NOD Read online

  NOD

  NOD

  Adrian Barnes

  For Ethan and Liam

  And Cain went out from the face of the Lorde and dwelt in the lande Nod on the east syde of Eden.

  —Genesis

  Adam and his race are a dream of mortal mind, because Cain went to live in the Land of Nod, the land of dreams and illusions.

  —Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health

  Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,

  And Nod is a little head,

  And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies

  Is a wee one’s trundle-bed;

  So shut your eyes while Mother sings

  Of wonderful sights that be,

  And you shall see the beautiful things

  As you rock on the misty sea

  —Eugene Field

  DAY 18: Words

  The object of words is to conceal thoughts

  It’s getting harder and harder to tell the living from the dead.

  Most of the remaining Awakened lay sprawled on the asphalt of Birchin Lane, six storeys below my balcony. Down there, everything’s akimbo: heads flop, tongues loll, and mouths are corkscrewed holes. Some are still ambulatory and stagger around in unsprung circles, clawing air. Others sit mannequin-still among the rubble, staring up at me from their laps, eyes blazing.

  They sacrificed another Sleeper last night, some poor chump in Birkenstocks who’s now lashed to a lamp post across the street by bloodstained bungee cords. The head, as always, has been painted lollipop yellow.

  And speaking of colours, there’s no sign of the Admiral of the Blue this evening: his rickety stage, cobbled together from smashed-down doors and thrashed trash cans, is bare. For a while the Admiral and his people treated me like a prophet, but I always knew it wouldn’t last. It’s Prophets-R-Us down there: what’s in desperate short supply is disciples. It reminds me of poets, before all this—how the sensitive souls who submitted their work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of about ten to one. Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening. Some things never change. Maybe nothing’s really changed.

  What else do I see? Packs of dogs, heads hovering low, roam the periphery of things. The long-standing human-canine alliance has been irretrievably severed, I’m sincerely sorry to report—the gnawed bones and matted chunks of hair scattered along the shores of Lost Lagoon testify to this. It’s sad, but then again those plump collies and German shepherds don’t seem too weighed down by nostalgia for bone-shaped vegan treats and belly rubs from the opposably-thumbed as they wander about, licking their chops. Anyway, it’s not their fault. We’re the ones who broke the deal.

  The Awakened spot me, and the crowd’s insect noise ratchets up. Beetlemania! I raise my arms, just for old time’s sake, and the street falls silent. I hold the pose for a moment then let them drop—a cue for the haunted house screaming to begin.

  I’m sure this all sounds pretty terrible, dear hypothetical reader, but you might be surprised to learn that I’m of the opinion that while things are bad now, they really weren’t much better before. All that’s different here in Nod is that the molten planetary core of pain that used to roil away behind our placid smiles has now blurped out into open air. How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All that’s different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and naked.

  And what about Love—our alpha and omega, our porn and our purity? In the past we’d held love in reserve as something special and untouchable, an element of our personal narratives that we felt would, in a pinch, absolve us of all our other petty sins. A Get Out Of Jail Free card, I suppose. But as it turns out, love doesn’t set us free—love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love.

  And so logically then, the question arises: what isn’t pain?

  I stand there on my balcony as the question rises, coiling into the sky above Vancouver, and hangs still, with no breath of breeze to make it blow away. The orange sun, made hazy and huge by the million square kilometre dust cloud that used to be Seattle, is slowly sinking into English Bay. I can almost hear hissing as the day, maybe the last day, extinguishes itself.

  Directly across the street from my apartment, in Demon Park, a siege of great blue herons bobs on overburdened cedar boughs. The names we give gatherings of birds are telling: murders of crows, sieges of herons, unkindnesses of ravens. They must have made our ancestors nervous. Birds pick at bones and lap at eye juice. Maybe they reminded our forbears that they’d be bones themselves, soon enough. The sight of pigeons waddling along the pavement has always seemed eerie to me; I’ve never been able to get over all that armlessness.

  Behind me, the stairwells gag on fifty apartments’ worth of furniture: everything but the kitchen sinks. The building’s risen bile cost me a couple of days of heavy labour, but it also bought Zoe and me some time. Since yesterday morning, though, I’ve been hearing ripping and snapping sounds coming from the lower floors. I’m pretty sure that Blemmyes are burrowing up toward us. White moles, digging into ceilings, discovering floors. Escheresque. Three floors below now? Two?

  And speaking of Escher, it’s worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call ‘reality’ there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact—a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned. Who’d have thought that the real high wire act of imagining was the old world, that seemingly bland assemblage of malls and media that came to a crashing end less than one month ago? Who’d have thought that the real fantasists were the Starbuckling baristas, the school teachers, and the pizza delivery boys? If we’d really stopped and thought, it would have been obvious. A cursory look at the latest appeal from sub-Saharan Africa should have told us that our privileged world was a pretty slapdash affair, always smouldering at the edges.

  But no one stopped, and no one thought.

  Christ, I’m tired in a million ways. We’ve been staring into the whites of each other’s eyes for weeks now, the Awakened and I—all of us coming up blank. But that’s okay. I really don’t mind. I’m just about ready to give it all up anyway.

  But what about poor, silent Zoë, already asleep in the spare bedroom, curled up with the stuffed grizzly that Tanya gave her? I may be about done with the whole sorry human comedy, but I still want her to survive. I want something that Tanya loved to live on. But tell that to those flayed faces down there, freshly-arrived for the night shift, insomniac suns thrust deep inside their pockets, scorching their thighs.

  What about Zoe? What about the child?

  DAY 1: Xerxes’ Tears

  When Xerxes, King of Persia, reviewed his magnificent and enormous army before starting for Greece, he wept at the thought of the slaughter about to take place

  That first morning I was reading about another child—a news story about a boy who ran and ran. ‘Incredibly Motivated Kid Takes Flight!’ hollered the headline. A breathless tale of how some urchin in San Francisco fled his broken mother, stole a car, outran the cops, made it to the airport, appended himself to a strange family, boarded a plane, and then got himself busted on the other end in LA as he scoured an airport phone book for evidence of his long-done daddy. The kicker? The boy was ten.

  It brought tears to my eyes, though I don’t know why. When thi
ngs really move us we never know why, not really. I do remember loving that ‘incredibly’, though—thought it wonderful that the headline writer’s enthusiasm had managed to poke its snout through stale newsprint and sniff my air. A ‘kid’, not a ‘child’. And note that exclamation mark! The headline alone was a masterpiece. I imagined some late night editor leaning back in an empty newsroom and contemplating her handiwork with a wry smile.

  The piece didn’t have a real ending. It just stopped dead, as news stories do, when the action tank ran dry. The truth was that, beyond story, beyond my flickering interest, that boy was still out there somewhere, enmeshed in some sort of ‘care’, trapped in Eternal Denouement.

  Tanya materialized in the kitchen doorway and pulled me from my daydream.

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Hey.’

  I got up and went over to her. My first thought was that she looked like hell, but I had it backwards. Tanya was heaven; I just didn’t appreciate it often enough back then. But my blindness was nothing unusual—in fact, it was almost a good working definition of what it meant to be human. I did know she hadn’t slept because she’d kept me up half the night with her sighing and quilt yanking. Now, wrapped in dawn, her warped sheets of hair and the bruise-like black beneath her eyes made her seem both innocent and debauched—a silent child over-filled with knowing. She leaned against the doorway in her nightie—such a strange word, like ‘panties’—watching me, leggies not quite directly beneath her torso. Torso. There’s no infantilizing that word.

  She came over and we kissed with pre-brushing tentativeness, brought together by soft intakes of air, by care. Her hair brushed against my cheek. Hair—she had sheets and sheets of it. Auburn hair that never stayed put. When she pinned it up, it flopped down, when she combed it straight, it curled and twisted. My nickname for her was Medusa.

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink,’ she yawned.

  ‘No kidding. It seemed like you were up half the night.’

  ‘Half a night’s sleep would have been amazing. It was really fucking weird. I didn’t even feel sleepy.’

  And it was weird. Tanya always slept like a fallen tree in a silent forest, invisible beneath an Oregon of quilts. One sharp little fart every few months—that was about all you’d hear from her between the hours of eleven and seven.

  ‘Too much coffee?’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t you remember? I actually had some warm milk while we watched Mad Men. Well, I’ll be queen bitch at work today, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I had a bad night, too.’

  ‘Poor baby.’

  This from someplace inside her distraction. A night watchman or Maytag repairman somewhere inside her scraped brain was looking out for me. And that was love.

  I’d slept badly and had a strange dream of golden light seen by something other than eyes. It was still with me there in the morning. Not a shadowy memory, but a vivid one that made the waking world seem drowsy.

  ‘I need a shower.’

  She turned and walked out of the room. I watched her go with a miser’s attention. Each remembered detail of her face and body was and is precious to me: the curve of her hips, her thin upper lip and full lower one. Even her almost-non-existent earlobes. Sometimes she claimed to be an alien spy, her human disguise flawed only in the earlobe department. She’d confess this to me, then wink.

  When Tanya returned, she was freshly laundered and professed herself human. She nuzzled my stubble and guzzled my neglected coffee while I soliloquized on the Incredibly Motivated Kid.

  ‘That’s so sad.’ She shook her head, sorry for the boy in an uncomplicated way that I could only envy.

  Then she dressed in a grey skirt and white blouse and left for work for the last time. Looking back now, I marvel at people who dared wear white. Did they think that the world wouldn’t touch them?

  Tanya went out, and I stayed in.

  In an age when pretty much everyone went out and shook the world’s hand all day long, shook it until their hands went numb, their hair turned grey, and their hearts coughed and sputtered, I stayed home and wrote books. On etymology, if you can believe that. I know, I know! A great word, etymology. It was a real can of mace when I found myself being nosed at by strangers at parties or on buses: I write books on etymology. Watch them stagger, see them scatter—even if ninety percent of them thought that I studied bugs, not the secret origins of words.

  My agent, still unsure about me after seven years of contractual bondage, was always pushing for an Eats Shoots and Leaves sort of mass placebo, the idea being to try to trick the public into consuming something inherently dry and bland by dusting it with MSG. I never delivered that book. I never refused, mind you—just went ahead and wrote other books which, published through unambitious presses, sold just enough copies to shut-ins and fuzzy-sweatered fussbudgets to draw forth more grudging grants, more painful teaching gigs, and to continue the damp seepage of royalties into my checking account.

  Our apartment was silly-small; French doors opening onto a one foot deep balcony took up the whole exterior wall of our living room—a failure’s balcony that at times seemed to urge me toward a laughable leap. Inside, our home was white and very bright. Behind the living room a kitchenette, and huddled behind that a bedroomette and a bathroomette stocked with lots of tiny soaps and shampoo bottles we’d pilfered from various hotels.

  I was working on my latest project that day—a book about the history of sidetracked words, of orphaned and deformed words. An etymological freak show. I was thinking of calling it Nod.

  Nod. Biblically, it’s the barren nightmare land where Cain was sent when expelled from Adam’s domain, but at the same time it’s a fairy tale kingdom toward which parents urge sleepy children with gentle pressure on the backs of their warm mammalian heads.

  Ah, sleep.

  In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn’t that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there’s never the slightest guarantee that we’ll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we’re happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives? Nod.

  Anyway, in forgetting words, my thesis went, we abandon them. But the realities those banished words gave voice to don’t vanish: old, unmanned realities lurk eternally in dark woods, in nursery tales, police reports, and skittish memories. Like Grimm wolves.

  All the old, whispered words still exist—fantastic words and phrases like ‘babies in the eyes’, ‘cavalry clover’, ‘doomrings’, ‘mawworm’ ‘Blemmye’. Thousands and thousands of them. And when we hear those words, even in the antiseptic light of the twenty-first century, we feel a slight breeze, a chill presence we can’t quite identify.

  ‘Birchin Lane’ was one phrase I remember wrangling with that day. ‘To whip’, as with a switch of birch. ‘I’m afraid I must take you on a trip down Birchin Lane’. An upper class British accent, the calm dignity before a storm of violence—physical or emotional. We all see this in our loved ones’ eyes at some point: the veil about to be torn down.

  Untold millions of people have lived on Birchin Lane. Centuries of women and children and not a few men have run the gauntlet down its cobblestone streets. With Nod, I was trying to corral Birchin Lane back inside the language, trying to coax it forward in time. The running of gauntlets, the paddling of asses. Cans of whup-ass. Samuel L. Jackson’s character speaking so calmly in Pulp Fiction: ‘I’m gonna get medieval on your ass’. Ass, ass, ass. I considered Guantanamo Bay and Dick Cheney’s snigger-smile; I pondered the gym-toned celebrities who fell beneath the media’s lash. And the throngs of voyeurs, the millions and millions of people just watching it all. Paris guillotines. Gaza. Damascus.

  You’ll laugh, but I secretly felt that Nod actually had some commercial potential, that people might actually want me to make these sorts of connections for them.

  Anyway, working at home, alone, suited me and I seemed to suit it. I didn’t have a lot
of time for people; you could say I had my reservations about the species. Maybe I’d spent too much time in the forest of unspoken words to emerge with any confidence in my fellow man. Tanya, who had no time for lumbering words like ‘misanthropic’, elected to believe I was just shy. She was always bringing people by the apartment, beaming friend-candidates for me to assess in the light of her belief I’d find value in them and vote to keep them around. It didn’t happen too often, but I’m glad she was wrong about me. And anyway, I loved her. Surely that counted for something.

  That was the see-saw balance we maintained, face to face, while the world rose and fell in the background. So long as my eyes remained fixed on Tanya’s, I never got too seasick. That was the trick.

  And so I stayed home and worked all day, never straying far from the clickity clack, phone and Internet on lockdown so that I could focus and make some solid progress. Every hour or two I’d pause, glance out the window, and there would be the sun, a couple of notches further advanced in its cause, frozen and guilty in the sky.

  Tanya got home around five o’clock, just as the sun began staring down its nose at the city. She straight-armed through the door and marched right up to me, stopped, and planted her hands on her hips.

  ‘Have you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’ I asked, pulling most of my face up from the laptop. She’d been warning me lately about half-faces and third-faces, so I was trying to be at least three quarters there for her.

  ‘About last night?’

  The ascending intonation, the short, stuttering head shake that pantomimes incredulity at another’s bone ignorance. I’ll call it a ‘duh’. Tanya duh-ed me.

  ‘What about last night?’

  She began to pace a disgusted circle. I’d been sorting invoices and receipts on the coffee table and as she strode past, the flimsy pieces of register paper trembled in her wake. I saw a fresh coffee stain on her white blouse. Heated by her body warmth, I could actually smell those molecules of connection as she passed my chair, could hear the erotic swish of nylon as her thighs scissored by.