DAY 13: Abraham’s bosom

The repose of the happy in death

Whatever final sleep had come for Brandon was coming for me as well—and maybe even faster than death was barrelling toward the Awakened. But I had one or two things left to accomplish in Nod before I allowed myself that release. And so when I got back to the classroom I made myself a jabbing nest of old math textbooks in hopes that I’d be able to sleep on a razor’s edge—exhausted enough to doze, but uncomfortable enough that I wouldn’t drift too far from the shores of Nod.

It worked, and I managed to contort my way through another night, and just as Ebeneezer Scrooge famously wondered if his ghostly visitations were poorly-digested morsels of cheese, so too was my return to consciousness a stiff piece of Math Fundamentals 6 jutting into my ribcage.

That night my dream was somewhat different. I was a five-hundred-foot tall giant striding through Vancouver, carelessly toppling skyscrapers with my elbows. There were people on the streets below, and I felt them burst like blueberries beneath the soles of my bare feet. For some reason I had to make it to the ocean and across the Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island where a tidal wave was about to crash on the west shore. But before I could enter the water, a massive wave broke over the ghostly sliver of the island visible on the horizon. And then, of course, the world exploded. This time, however, as the last fragments dissolved into Golden Light, I saw the park, intact. Children running through the trees, mouths contorted in either laughter or terror.

The next morning, I woke to find someone had left an unopened bag of chips on the floor for my breakfast: Zesty Cheese Doritos. I ate them as best I could, though I tasted nothing and the exercise left me with a sore gut, raw lips, and a raging thirst. I crumpled the metallic bag, and the sound was hangover loud. Then I sat on the warm linoleum by the window and thought about Tanya.

True story. One New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago, she drank far, far too much, then spent the hours between midnight and dawn vomiting repeatedly, anywhere and everywhere. She puked in the same way heavy smokers clear their throats, casually, unconsciously. I spent those hours following her around with a bucket, holding her hair back, and listening to her laugh and cry, laugh and cry. She giggled about a conversation she’d had with a friend earlier that evening, then grew angry about it, then wept. Swampwatered all over the place. Shook her head fiercely whenever I tried to utter some inept words of commiseration.

‘Don’t talk. Just don’t,’ she warned every time I opened my mouth. I remember feeling as though, robbed of my words, I had nothing else to offer. Still, all in all a tender memory. If you’ve ever loved somebody besides yourself that won’t surprise you too much.

Someone once said that we get more difficult to love with each passing year because, over time, our histories grow so tangled that newcomers can no longer bushwhack their way into the thicketed and overgrown depths of our hearts. I’d search and cite those words for you if I could. I’d really like to give proper credit for the insight because it’s true: Tanya’s and my intertwined histories were like varicose veins on an old man’s ankles. Who could truly know an old man or woman, coming cold upon them in a nursing home when they’re ninety-two years old? It’s too late, by then. All we see are crooked shadows, faces rewritten as caricature, fully-lived lives recast as rasped anecdotes.

Looking over at the abandoned grizzly lying face down on the floor, I remembered the blood on Tanya’s chin when Charles had spoken about the kids in the park. Something about the fairy tale intensity of that red trickle made me believe that whatever spark was left in her brown eyes would flare up in Zoe’s defence. All of which is a roundabout way of prefacing the revelation that I found myself roaming the halls of the school that morning. Looking for Tanya.

The Awakened were growing visibly more frail, still going about their nonsensical business, but more and more slowly. Their weary eyes were tiny movie projectors, and as they stared, I felt myself covered with wobbly tattoos of light: old home movies and horror scenes. There was a lot of sneezing and coughing going on all around me as ravaged immune systems fizzled and sparked.

‘Do you know where Medusa is?’ I asked the first person I met, a teenaged girl wearing a full-face motorcycle helmet. She was walking down a hall, tapping on the walls every six inches then listening.

She nodded, smiling strangely.

‘Where?’

But she just shook her head and recommenced tapping and listening, face pressed against the self portraits and box-and-triangle drawings of houses floating beneath a sea of yellow paint.

‘I know where Medusa is.’

I turned and saw my wild-haired young friend. The believer.

‘Where is she?’

‘My name’s White-in-the-eye.’ It was once said that the devil had no white in his eye. ‘I can take you there.’

He led me to the next floor down, then toward the furthest end of the hall, talking all the while.

‘How did you know it was coming?’

That stumped me. Had I seen Nod coming? It was true that part of me had always remained outside the old world—a ghost with folded arms. I think I always suspected that some sort of fraud was being perpetuated as I watched ‘normal’ play out. Maybe I just expected more of life than it was realistically even going to be able to deliver—maybe I was a romantic.

Real romantics are never the ones with the easy, winning ways about them; the real romantics are always the guarded ones, the paranoid and the worried, the ones with furrowed brows and coffee jitters. After all, anybody looking with open eyes at the world we’d made would have to have been very, very worried.

So maybe, in that way, I had seen Nod’s skull and crossbones mast on the horizon.

‘Maybe. Maybe I saw two worlds, one on top of the other. But it was fuzzy, like when you try on someone else’s glasses.’

White-in-the-eye nodded gravely, then asked me about the ship again. Soon we stopped outside a closed door. Then he turned and spoke, tipsy with revelation.

‘You dreamed up Nod when you wrote your book, right? But Nod wasn’t the dream—the old world was. When you were dreaming of Nod, you were really awake! That’s why you’re the prophet.’

And I got it then. The Awakened had it backward. The old ‘reality’ of Vancouver had been unreal, a dream. Yes. I was with them that far. But the real reality wasn’t Nod—Nod was just all the dreams and nightmares smushed together in a blender. Real reality would be whatever remained intact after Nod had hammered down upon our heads and ripped away the last shreds of the veil of the old world. And that would be? What would endure?

Tanya.

White-in-the-eye opened the door and showed me a yellow room awash with light. The sun, visible through the window, smelled like a coat of fresh paint. Tanya lay propped up against a desk, hunched forward, hands between her spread legs. She was breathing with great effort: The Little Engine That Probably Couldn’t For Much Longer. Oxygenated blood wasn’t reaching her gray fingertips and blackened toes. Each breath was a momentous decision, undertaken only after serious consideration. And she wasn’t alone. Outside this room, Death was stalking the dusty halls, picking and choosing as he went. Out in the alley, there was a reeking, akimbo pile of meat that grew every day when I wasn’t looking.

I went over and tried to ease her down onto her back, but she screamed and threw her face at me. It was a horrible sight.

‘I won’t lie down and you can’t fucking make me!’

‘But you can’t breathe like this.’

‘I can’t lie, can’t lie. Sleepers are liars! Golden light, golden lie…’

Weakly, she pushed away the hand I’d placed on her shoulder. She was someone you might have seen begging on a street corner in the Third World: too far gone for genteel Developed World beggary, for the haute couture of the Salvation Army-swathed squeegee kid. She smelled like rotten fish and vomit. I had to turn away to take a breath, and when I turned back she was coughing and gurgling to herself. Her words, though unintelligible, had the intonation of conversation.

‘Tanya. I need to find Zoe. You remember Zoe? The little girl we found? You gave her that stuffed bear?’

She stopped mumbling and looked up, looked at me. Suddenly, someone was home, though peering through a filthy attic window. I struggled to hold her gaze as she crooked her finger, drew me nearer, and whispered, ‘Why didn’t you like people, Paul?’

How could I have replied to that? I could have confessed that I liked the idea of people, but not the reality. I could have said that in some insane way White-in-the-eye had been right and that I had seen Nod coming and had been hoping to stand clear of its path. Instead, I opted for the truth.

‘I don’t know why.’

‘I’d have left you I’d have left you I’d have left you I’d…’ Then she stopped and changed direction. ‘What did you dream last night?’

‘I was a giant, taller than the skyscrapers. Walking toward the beach. Then a tidal wave came over the horizon. The water was shining, and it really hurt my eyes.’

‘What happened next?’ She’d heard this story before and was suddenly playing an old game called ‘story time’.

‘The world exploded.’

‘Like a bomb hit it?’

I shook my head into her shoulder. ‘No. Not like that at all. More like it was a collage where the pieces weren’t glued down and someone opened the door and all the pieces just fluttered away.’

‘Just blew away…poor baby. Then what?’ She was being the little girl she’d sometimes liked to be. More than once, in the past, I’d wondered if she stuck with me because I was good at recounting old fairy tales. Because I was good at bedtime stories.

‘Then the pieces all disappeared and there was nothing left but golden light.’

She burrowed into me. ‘And then what?’’

‘Just light. It went on forever.’

Tanya looked up toward my face, but her eyes could no longer see, which meant it looked as though she saw everything. This was how she would die. This was how the world was dying.

‘Pretty Zoe’s in the furnace room. It’s hot down there. Hot as Hell’s Gate…’

She smiled as she trailed off. Then another murder. I cut her throat with an orange box cutter I found in a cupboard then cradled her head, suddenly tiny and nut hard beneath all that raving hair, as her body thrashed a little, but not too much, and her blood dyed my blue jeans purple.

When it was over, her earlobes, the ones she’d told me marked her as alien, marked her as mine. I bowed my head and kissed each one in turn.