DAY 14: Walking Gentleman

In theatrical parlance, means one who has little or nothing to say, but is expected to deport himself as a gentleman when before the lights.

Your indulgence for an elegy.

We met in university, in a second year philosophy class. I was there because I believed that three hundred year old arguments about the nature of the universe were somehow time sensitive (I know, I know), while Tanya enrolled—so she said—because the class fit her timetable. After we graduated I went on to write my books and she became a well-paid publicist for a fairly large chemical company with a host of dubious contracts. We strove to maintain the fine balance I mentioned earlier, with intellectual ‘purity’ on my side of the ledger and the slapping heft of the bacon she brought home on Tanya’s. When the pedal hit the metal and the rubber hit the road, though, the scales tipped in her favour. She could mock my financial worthlessness all she wanted, but I couldn’t really dig too deeply at her hollow careerism given that it put bread on the corporeal table. Rather than confront this disconnect in some conclusive manner, however, we did as most couples and just lived with it as best we could.

Ours was a classic mismatch with all the makings of a screwball comedy. Did hilarity ensue? Sometimes. At other times, though, during the outtakes, awkward silences and buried resentments ensued as well. And if you made a two-hour movie covering a seven year relationship there were going to be a lot of outtakes. But still, we soldiered on.

After three or four years together, we began to understand one another a little. It came to light that Tanya liked my verbosity because it spoke to something trapped inside her that needed to get out. As for me, there was something appealing about the outward shell she’d been developing, her World Armour. The hardness of that shell implied a softness at the centre, a secret place into which I probably hoped I could retreat—a mirror for my own lack of outward form—when I got sick of the sound of my own voice or the thought balloon shape of my own thoughts.

Then, as time loped along, Tanya changed in a way I could never quite get my head around. Maybe her armour thickened to the point where there was no point of entry for someone as amorphous as me. Amorphous: that’s amore, always morphing. It got tricky when I realized one day that I’d have to begin to get used to the idea of living without the shelter she’d once seemed to offer, and that she’d have to accept that I was needy. But still we kept trudging forward. Maybe everyone had to wade through this muck, we thought. Still, there was now something stranger-like about her; and I sensed that if we were to remain together, I’d have to learn to love and protect that strangeness.

It sounds like a bleak landscape, but it wasn’t, not really. There were romantic sunsets and soft shadows as well as forensic facts under antiseptic light. We made love and laughed together. And we watched our favourite shows throughout what had to be the Golden Age of Television, no matter how dubious a sobriquet that is. We liked to cook together on Sunday afternoons. Those things counted too.

At least that’s how I saw it. God knows I never said any of this stuff, not to Tanya or to anybody else. Nobody says these things—it’s against the rules—but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love.

Most of the people we’d known were busy playing out a game of ‘no limits’ in their relationships and careers. They were serial Humpty Dumpties, falling apart then putting themselves back together again, over and over, beneath new horizons made of unfamiliar hips and thighs. Maybe I’d been unsociable because I feared infection, and maybe Tanya had been out there with them, swimming around in the genetic soup. I’d thought Tanya and I were different, that we were going to swallow reality whole and let it live inside us despite the surfeit of fantasy on offer. Big oops: in the end it turned out that reality was bigger and crueller than I’d imagined.

Wherever my love for Tanya lived, wherever it lives now, that place was neither the old Vancouver nor Charles’ cracked-out Fantasyland. Love lives someplace else. Is that it? Or are there simply no words for what I’m trying to say?

In the basement a skeletal crew. Eyes bulging in the dimness, they sat hunched over tables strewn with rusty iron bars, steel hooks, baling wire, and rope. Working, making. Long staves with ragged clusters of sharp metal fixed to their ends. Floating above candles, their faces were goblin-like. All around them, in the dimness, a forest of completed staffs were stacked against the walls. The weapons appeared numberless, but I knew how many there were, or would very soon be: precisely a thousand.

A gate to Hell? Yes.

But was Zoe down here? I peered hard into the dim and distant corners. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide her, but then again the basement was a cavernous place—a moonscape of unfinished concrete and impenetrable shadows. It was terrible to think of that poor little thing, so obviously a creature that belonged in the light, locked away down there.

Then I saw it—the school’s ancient furnace skulking, cold and dunce-like in a far corner; a rusted box with an arthritic assemblage of pipes extending up into the rafters. A small iron door in its exact centre. If you lived in a place like Nod, where else would you stow a demon?

The goblins were beginning to notice my presence. Several were watching me, eyes probing but not penetrating, jaws working silently.

‘What? What?’ asked a woman at the nearest table. ‘What?’

‘Will you be ready soon?’ I asked as imperiously as I could manage. It’s tough work being a prophet: every time you ask someone for the time, your reputation is in mortal peril.

She nodded for a full ten seconds, eyes shut, before replying. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll be ready when the sun comes up. Not the next sun, but the one after. Yes, yes. We’re almost ready…’

In two days, then. It was time to give the Cat Sleepers their heads up.

It was almost dawn. Back in the classroom, I signalled Dave as instructed. Almost as soon as I’d finished, an answering flash came from down the block. If nothing else, insomniacs make great watchmen. I ran down to the black alley, exchanged a few whispered words with the three Cat sleepers, then crept back upstairs and turned my mind back to Zoe. If the Rabbit Hunt was to take place in two days, then tomorrow would be the obvious time to rescue her from the basement, given that almost all of Charles’ people would be otherwise occupied. It wasn’t an airtight plan—it wasn’t a plan at all—but it was a hope. And a hope in Nod was something.

My eyes were burning and raw, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down on my bed of textbooks and close them for a while. But before I could move, rough hands grabbed me from behind, and Charles’s voice whispered into my ear.

‘No biggie, Paul, no biggie. Nobody’s going to hurt you, but there’s something down at the beach that you really need to see.’

That ‘something’ was colossal. An aircraft carrier, run aground on the edge of English Bay. The American warship— the name ‘USS Nassau’ was painted on its side—appeared to have approached land under full power and had managed to beach itself so far up onto the shore that the prow was completely exposed. Five or six storeys high, one side of its grey hull was blackened and pitted, torn and buckled, while the other side was untouched—unflinching grey in the early morning sunlight. The crowning bizarreness to the scene was the sound coming from within the vessel: humming, low and steady, but with shrill overtones that wove in and out. Someone had neglected to turn off the engine. Clearly, this was the ship whose lights I’d seen out in the bay.

Beside me, Charles stared hard, trying to cram the sight into Nod. He looked like shit—like one of those inflated dummies you’d see outside drive-thru espresso kiosks, the ones that, powered by a big fan, would fill with air, trembling and rigid, then go limp for a moment only to inflate again seconds later. On the way over here, he’d limped when he walked and drooled when he talked, wiping his nose constantly.

We’d arrived here at the head of a silent procession of around two hundred of the Awakened. They now stood arrayed around us in a protective ring, and that was a good thing, because we were far from alone on that beach. Around the ship, around us, hundreds of others were gathered. Charles’ contingent, which had felt mighty when we’d left the yellow school, now seemed decidedly puny.

It suddenly struck me that not everyone left alive even knew about Nod. Everyone? Holy shit, I thought, almost no one knew about Nod. The vast majority of the Awakened were living in nameless kingdoms of their own terrified devising, and now they were ranged all around us, trembling and grinding their teeth. The creatures I’d seen two nights ago had now taken human forms, but were no less bizarre for that.

‘What do you think, Paul?’ Charles asked in a conversational tone. He’d pulled himself together: there was no indication in his ruby red eyes that he was impressed by the immensity of what we were all gawking at—or that he’d heard of Tanya’s death.

‘You’re the Admiral of the Blue. You tell me.’

He didn’t answer, so I looked around. The crowd appeared weak and disoriented, dangerous only in the heft of their numbers, though that was dangerous enough. How did they keep going? They must have been reduced to drinking drain water and licking empty tins of cat food clean by now. Walking back from the SkyTrain station I’d seen a group of women gnawing bark peeled from an arbutus tree, red like beef jerky. Swallow. Cramp. Retch. Repeat.

Suddenly, Charles spoke loudly, to everyone within earshot.

‘We’ll board the ship! Your Admiral will greet its captain! Make room!’

A cheer from the residents of Nod at this and a curious craning of necks from the rest. Charles’s eyes were glazed with fierce tears as he watched his people clear a spot on the beach near the ship, into which we quickly moved. I almost felt happy for the poor bastard; you couldn’t deny that he’d come a long way from cadging conversational scraps along Denman Street.

Hands on hips, Charles ordered one of his men to throw a rope with a large hook tied to one end up at the destroyer’s rails. No small feat, given that the ship’s deck was easily forty feet above our heads and backlit by the sun to boot. It took eight or nine tries, but finally the hook cleared the rails and clanked onto the deck. The non-Nod crowd cheered this achievement and pressed forward, drawn to any display of resourcefulness and order. The Awakened’s ring of linked arms, five deep, rippled but held.

‘Listen!’ Charles cried.

And the crowd listened.

‘This ship is named the Ragnarok! There’s a message for us up there on its decks, and it’s a message that you all need to hear! I promise you that if you wait, you’ll all hear it!’

Ragnarok. A pretty good name for a nuclear powered warship, I had to admit: the Norse word for ‘apocalypse’. Better than ‘Nassau’ with its connotations of frat boy vacations and disco music, anyway.

The guy who’d hooked the rope somehow managed to shimmy up and disappeared over the railing. A few minutes of silence followed during which all eyes remained fixed on the ship’s horizon. Finally, the black speck of the climber’s head reappeared and the crowd exhaled as a rope ladder tumbled down. Charles called three of his people over. Big men and all of them had bandages around their heads, blood in caked rivulets down their necks. He pointed at the ladder, and the five of us began to climb.

The deck was echo empty. No planes, nothing except for the unbelievable complexity of the bridge tower and its cacophony of antennae and satellite dishes. A metal planet, silent except for a string of flags that snapped in the wind and the seagulls’ distant, wind-borne desolation. One of Charles’ damaged gym apes reached over the rail and hauled up the ladder. Now we were alone.

Charles eyed the bridge tower with the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, longing to climb it and make it his own.

‘There are worse places to die,’ he mused, to himself but with my overhearing him very clearly in mind.

‘Pardon?’

‘Than here. In the sun. You won’t mind, will you? I’d say, given recent bereavements, that you’re about done with Nod. Am I wrong, Paul? It’s time. Probably, it will be like one of those dreams of yours. You can lie on your back and stare at the sun while we do it. You know, Aztec-style.’

Then he nodded, and before I could react his men moved in close. I felt something cold and sharp digging into my ribs.

‘A giant Roc is going to fly straight down out of the sun and martyr you, Paul. But don’t worry: it’s a noble ending. You’ll fight back very bravely and you won’t have died for nothing. You’ll save my life, and as you lie dying you’ll anoint me king with your last gasp—I’ll make sure everyone knows you were a hero.’

I must have smirked, because Charles grew livid.

‘That’s how the story crumbles, Paul. All the way back from the Old Testament, the new one, and all the way through Nod: the prophet brings the truth, and then he dies. Simple.’

I didn’t answer, so he kept on talking.

‘So nice that it’s just you and me here at the end, Paul. They,’ he indicated his crew, ‘can’t hear a thing, so we can talk frankly and openly. Look at that one. He was a fucking lawyer two weeks ago. That’s why I chose him for my special guard: irony. He drove an Audi. Now he snips his ears off with garden shears just because I suggest that it might be a good idea if he wanted to avoid having demons whisper terrible suggestions to him in the dark. It’s a wonderful world, Paul. Fucked up as it ever was, for sure, but still wonderful. A real meritocracy. Finally.’

‘You can kill me if you want to, but you’re going to die yourself, Charles. Really soon—you know that, right? And your Rabbit Hunt is going to fail. There’s no point in any of it.’

He shook his head and spat. ‘No! I’ve got babies in my eyes. There are babes in the wood, Paul. In Demon Park. People in the stocks, locked in the wood. Then there’s babies in the eyes and that’s love. So we’ll have a Rabbit Hunt and we’ll flush out those demons and we’ll put them in the stocks and we’ll have their eyes and our love will keep us alive.’ He hacked desperately into his sleeve. ‘You wouldn’t understand. A riddle has been set, Paul. Your entire fucking manuscript is a giant riddle, and I’m the one who’s solved it. Not you. You don’t even know where the question marks go. The answer to the riddle is ‘name it and it’s yours’. And I’m—’

Charles’ supervillain soliloquy was interrupted by a male voice, crackling at top volume over the ship’s PA system.

‘It was me! I did it!’

Charles looked around wildly. So did his crew, in earless imitation of their master. There was no way to tell where the transmission was coming from.

‘It was me! If you’re looking for the man, I’m the goddamned man!’

Then I saw it: movement on the bridge tower. I bolted. It took Charles and company a couple of heartbeats to react, but by then it was no contest. Charles and his goons were the walking wounded, but I was still a rough approximation of my old ten-kilometres-four-days-a-week self. By the time I reached the base of the bridge tower, they were more than fifty feet behind me.

A series of metal stairs zigzagged up the bridge’s side. Picking one at random, I began to climb. I quickly learned that military ships were specifically designed to be scalable: where one set of steps ended, either another would begin or there would be a set of metal hoops welded onto the wall that led to a ladder or another set of stairs. It felt like a series of lucky breaks but my progress was really the design of whatever Norse god had constructed the Ragnarok. In no time, I was nearing the top—the winner in a giant game of Snakes and Ladders.

Meanwhile, that frantic voice was still broadcasting.

‘I had a cancer brain and it told me to make a mushroom cloud. Get it? You fucking maniacs! Now I’ll tell you how to make your own goddamn mushroom cloud!’

A male voice with a Texan accent whose cadence seemed to reflect the unseen speaker’s military profession: driving points home in a staccato style.

‘I see you coming. I see you climbing. Better come quick, boy.’ His voice mocked me. ‘Time’s a wasting! Come on, boy! You’re almost there!’

And then I was there. Standing on a thin deck that ran around the top of the bridge. I looked down. Charles and company were huffing and puffing up toward my perch. I turned and peered in through the window.

He was terribly burned. A stained officer’s uniform over barbequed skin that was hanging from his body in curling chunks. And between those chunks was the molten lava of raw, red under-flesh. Scraps of hair clung to his head and his eyes were haunted blue, their whites blazing as he stared at me from across a frontier of unimaginable pain.

Tearing my eyes away, I tried to turn the door handle but it was locked. I pounded on the glass, but it wasn’t glass—it was something much stronger.

‘Not so fast! No one gave you permission to enter the bridge, son!’

‘Let me in!’

He tapped his ear and shook his head, laughing silently, a microphone pressed between the stubs of his ruined hands.

‘Your friends down there want to do you harm, do they? Worried you might get hurt? You’ve come to the wrong place. Son, I’ve killed millions. It’s not that big a deal. I’m the biggest mass murderer in the history of the god damn world.’

I was listening to a public address system while, right in front of me, the officer’s frayed lips synched badly to the bullhorn sound. Behind me the stairs clanged louder and louder. I looked around, but there was no other way down. Then I turned back to the officer and noticed something. His eyes. They were clear and steady amid the smoking wreckage of his face.

‘Look at my eyes!’ I yelled.

‘What’s that?’

‘My eyes! I sleep. Just like you. Look at my eyes. I’m not like them.’

He staggered forward until he was a foot away, only a thin sheet of super-glass between us. It was all I could do to hold his gaze.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he murmured and wordlessly reached over and unlocked the door. I slipped inside and slammed it shut just as the bandaged head of one of Charles’ men came into view. Within moments all three of them were pounding on the bridge’s door and windows, but to no avail. I felt like sticking my tongue out at them. In fact, if I’m to be honest, I did stick my tongue out at them in a moment of adrenaline-fuelled triumph that only added to Charles’ rage.

My host reeled backward, groping for a chair, then fell into it, wincing.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he repeated. ‘I thought I was the only one left.’

Scattered all around the bridge, covering virtually every horizontal surface, were empty syringes.

‘There aren’t many of us. I’ve only met one other Sleeper myself. Except for the kids.

‘Kids?’

‘There are children in Stanley Park over there,’ I gestured toward the tree line. ‘They sleep. They look normal, like kids from before. But they don’t talk.’

‘All the kids?’ His eyes shone.

‘No. Not all. Most of them are like those guys out there. In fact, I think the kids who can’t sleep are already all dead. They wouldn’t survive for long out there. But in the park there are a few hundred of these other kids.’

‘Bullshit.’

He was getting agitated again, grinding his teeth. Noticing the revolver strapped to his hip, I decided not to press the point any further. After a moment, he looked up at me, something cagey in his eyes.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you, man. Shit, I’ve got to tell someone.’

‘What?’

‘It was me.’

‘What was you?’ I asked, though the answer flashed through my mind even as I spoke.

‘I took out Seattle.’

‘You launched the missile?’

‘Not me, exactly. But it happened on my watch and I was the only one in my right mind, so it was my fault. I was locked in my quarters, sleeping, when the others did it. But I was in command.’ He said this with a kind of tortured pride, the kind I’d never been able to relate to but had the sense to respect: doctor pride, cop pride, mother pride.

‘Why’d they—?’

‘It was so fucking crazy and every day it got crazier and crazier. A couple of days after the whole thing started, we started having to throw men in the brig if we were going to maintain discipline. Two days later, we ran out of cells to put them in. All sorts of stories started flying around, spooking everyone. Then we had to start shooting them to keep them in line. Control told us the same thing was happening everywhere. Some of the officers rallied around me. They thought I could figure out a solution because I could think clearer. Because I could sleep. But they didn’t really trust me, you know? Yeah, I can tell you know. Anyhow, they launched the fucking missile from one mile out, aimed it straight at the downtown core, at the goddamn Space Needle for all I know. Everyone on deck was killed. I survived the blast because I was sleeping down below. Fuck. The others who survived told me about some plague, how one of them had had a vision of some plague, and they had to sterilize the city to stop it. Bat shit crazy. Then they took over from me and decided to sail up here to repeat the trick. But by then I’d disabled the missile control panels and they couldn’t launch. Meanwhile, we were all getting sicker and sicker from the radiation.’

‘And then what?

‘And then a couple of nights ago, I took my revolver and finished off the last dozen of them. Bam, bam, bam. Like target practice. They were all just about done for anyway. It’s just me now.’

‘So why did you…?’

‘Ram the shore?’ He moistened ruined lips with a swollen tongue. ‘After a few hours out there watching the shit going down on this beach I figured I might as well finish the job my men started. Not for crazy reasons, you know, but a mercy killing. Only I couldn’t re-arm the nukes. You need two people with the right codes pressing the same buttons at the same times. So I thought about the reactor that runs the engines.’

‘But I just told you, you’re not the only sane one left. There are—’

‘There’s nothing left. I can’t even sleep any more myself, man. It hurts so bad. I think I’m turning into one of them. I keep thinking bad thoughts. I just want to sleep. To dream. Damn, it hurts. I’ll tell you one thing: now I know how a goddamned burnt hot dog feels.’

I choked up a little at that. A joke. The first one I’d heard, I was pretty sure, since this whole mess started. Humour had been the first casualty in Nod, and a humourless world seemed somehow even more tragic than one filled with pain and suffering. There has always been suffering, but humour had helped make it bearable.

He was speaking again.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Paul.’

‘Tyler. Tyler Brown. Lieutenant first class. I was.’

He shifted stiffly in his chair and winced. A pink tear started to stumble down his cracked cheek.

‘Is there anything I can do for you, Tyler?’

He laughed and shook his head. ‘You can shoot me, brother. You willing to do that?’

‘You’ve got to be in a lot of pain.’

‘No, man. No, I’m cruising through junkie heaven. There’s twenty gallons of morphine down below.’ He gestured around the room at the syringes. ‘I don’t feel much except when I pass by a mirror. That hurts a shitload, believe me.’

We both laughed, but it felt like a wake for laughter. Whatever their other virtues, I couldn’t see the kids in the park trading quips or cracking wise.

Tyler picked up an empty syringe and threw it on the floor. ‘It’s a joke in so many ways, man. I joined the navy because every kid in my neighbourhood was getting hooked on shit like this. And here I’m going to end my days as a junkie.’ He switched tracks. ‘You hungry? There’s a restaurant down below, you know. Massive chow.’

By now, the kicking and pounding had stopped. I turned and found Charles staring straight at me. There were wolves in those bloodshot eyes and a gnawing of bones in that grinding jaw. I noted that one of his henchmen was missing, probably sent to get reinforcements.

I moved close to the glass and winked at him, disappointing myself with my casual cruelty. Charles was on the outside yet again and that had to be unspeakably hard to take—especially for a newly-anointed king.

Down in the mess hall, I stuffed my face with fried bacon, canned ravioli, and that perennial military favourite, Spam. Tyler had assured me that the ship was locked down and that no one was going to be able to break in with anything less than a blowtorch and a working set of Jaws of Life.

We’d been down there for a couple of hours, trading stories in between his morphine injections. I was becoming aware of a pattern: Tyler would get more and more agitated and angry, then inject himself and calm down for ten or twenty minutes, dreamy but lucid. He’d taken to jabbing the needle into his forearm without much of an effort to find a viable vein. There was no way he could carry on like this for much longer. What if he overdosed and died tonight? Then there would be no way to shut the ship down.

He watched me eat with what looked like envy, but took nothing for himself. Instead he sat opposite me, propped in a chair, arms stiff at his sides, taking occasional noisy sips from a juice box. It was hard to imagine how he blinked, let alone walked or sat: he seemed to be melting before my eyes. In fact, he probably was.

‘How long until the reactor melts down if you don’t turn it off?’

He cleared his throat. ‘No idea. As it turns out, I never blew up a nuclear powered aircraft carrier before. Not too long.’

‘And are you going to shut it down?’

He was ready for my question and belligerent in his reply. ‘Why would I? I’ll be doing us all a favour by speeding the goddamn process up by a few days. You and I get to waltz off into our dreams. And those poor bastards out there will be better off as well.’ He snorted. ‘Pacification of the local populace.’

‘Even if you’re right about that, what about the children I told you about in the park? They don’t need to die.’

He was already prepping himself for another needle, the third since I’d met him. He pushed the plunger down and fell back in his chair, needle dangling.

‘It’s bullshit,’ he said dreamily. ‘Pure, unadulterated bullshit. There’s nothing left to save. I’ve been watching this place through my fucking high powered military fucking telescope. It’s a nightmare. Pacification of the captain, pacification of the enemy. We all just want some peace. Well, I’m the goddamn peacemaker…’

His voice drifted off and I became aware of a distant, hollow pounding—Charles’ people trying to smash their way inside. At dusk, we’d watched them building a bonfire on the main deck. About three dozen of the Awakened armed with crowbars and sledgehammers.

‘But why not just let things play out? What if you play God and you’re wrong?’

This woke him up. ‘God? Don’t start with God, son. If there was a God, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess. I had kids you know. Three. Amy, Jimmy, and baby Anna. They’re dead. Wife dead, dog dead. Cat, too. Though I never thought much of that cat.’ Here he laughed until a coughing fit cut him off. ‘God? Fuck him. This, whatever’s left now, it’s just a shadow. The party’s over, and the sooner somebody turns out the lights, the better. Am I right?’

‘But the kids I’m talking about are different.’

Tyler stared straight at me with an intensity that I was beginning to find chilling. Suddenly I was aware of how alone we were down here.

‘Different from my kids? Better than mine? No they fucking aren’t. Those kids of yours do sound like fucking demons. When I think about them floating around out there in the dark, not making a sound, just watching people? Honest, it sounds scarier than your buddy Charles. Christ, how those kids of yours must torment those poor sleepless bastards.’

‘But—’

‘Now, I’m not going to stop you from doing whatever you feel you’ve got to do. Just don’t you try to stop me from…from…’

He fumbled around for another needle.

‘Can you help me get out of the ship so I can go help that girl, Zoe I told you about?’

He reeled as the next wave of euphoria hit him, and I felt my question had at least been well-timed.

‘That’s nothing. There are a thousand ways out of here. You can check out any time but you can never leave…’

‘What if I bring her here? Show you? Will you shut off the engines then?’

He coughed and either shook his head or shuddered as the morphine babbled through his system.

‘Such a lovely place, such a lovely place…’