NOD Page 7

  ‘Where’s my pillow? Where’d you hide my goddamn pillow!?’

  I didn’t have his pillow. That wasn’t good news.

  I spun around and faced my accuser’s scabbed and hairy-scary shins.

  ‘Give me my fucking pillow!’

  Then, for a while, nothing.

  Someone’s shirt was wadded under my throbbing head, and a steady circle of faces stared down at me, their lips gnawed raw and their eyes abandoned. Behind them the sky. When I tried to sit up, they scattered, as though afraid. After a while they moved closer again, forming a whispering ring around me.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  No response.

  I staggered to my feet, thinking fast, hoping against hope to create some fellow-feeling.

  ‘Did you get the asshole who hit me?’

  Still no reply. At the front of the group, a woman in filthy jeans scratched her crotch vigorously, like she was grating cheese. Too dizzy to make a run for it, I started to slowly back away, praying that the circle would break and let me pass. One step, two. Then I bumped into someone standing behind me, blocking my retreat. I turned and saw him.

  Charles.

  He was dressed all in blue. Sky blue shirt, baby blue slacks, medieval Catholic blue shoes, fresh from some plundered boutique—all the while exuding his customary raw red welcome. I couldn’t take my eyes of the sharp cuffs of his sleeves and his crisp shirt collar. Possessions no longer existed in the old way. As in the case of any catastrophe, things were now just lying around waiting to be picked up. But how to keep them? That would be the new problem that would now replace the old one of acquisition.

  Charles pulled a greasy, thumb-damp wad of paper from his back pocket and held it in front of my face. It was the printout of Nod Tanya and I had taken to breakfast five long mornings ago. And then, too late to do me any good, it all clicked into place: motive, opportunity, and madness. Of course.

  ‘Welcome to Nod, Paul,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the dream you’ve brought us.’ And then louder, to the group, ‘Welcome home to your own people, teacher.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I hissed.

  He smiled and kept talking.

  ‘Can you hear the humility?’ He turned and addressed the crowd. ‘Didn’t I tell you he’d be humble? That when he came he’d be humble for us? Blemmyes and banshees, no fear! Oh, the devil is out there, roaming between the tipping skyscrapers, dressed as a monk and looking for souls, but no fear! This man can spot the devil from a mile away! Evil Rat and his army are out there, but this man will conjure them away!’

  Several people began to dart frightened looks around. Others sneered, but nervously, if you can imagine that. This was a crowd on the verge of some big decision with heavy implications for both Charles and me.

  ‘Tell us the plan,’ the crotch-grating woman demanded. Less than a week ago she’d been a high-end soccer mom: her blondeness was still relatively intact, and her voice still sounded accustomed to being heard.

  Charles grabbed my arm and began to lead me toward the school. The urgency of his tugging told me what I already suspected: he wasn’t the master of this group, only its provisional leader. Eyes glowered as we began to move away.

  ‘Soon! I need to show Paul the temple first. Then he’ll speak to you! Just wait here!’

  And they stayed put, though their blood surged toward us.

  ‘What’s happening, Charles?’ I whispered as we entered the school.

  The foyer was dim, though the pocked linoleum glared in black, refracted sunlight.

  He was giggling. ‘It’s all coming true, Paul. All of it. Just like you wrote.’

  ‘Like I wrote?’

  He started playing sly. ‘You know. All the old words are waking up and rubbing their eyes! The Church Invisible is becoming the Church Visible. Now that sleep is finally over.’ He was quoting my own words back at me, distorted through the funhouse mirror of his mind.

  ‘You think that I…? That’s—’ I was going to say ‘crazy’ but reconsidered.

  ‘The businessman! While the businessman guzzles his martini, Paul—I really shouldn’t have to be telling you this—while he guzzles, he tells his friends in the bar that it’s all a game. The way he makes his money, I mean. He tells them that while the poor parade on by, outside in the freezing cold. The windows are steamed, Paul, and he can’t see outside and they can’t see in. It’s Christmas, and he makes us all swallow the contradiction, forces it down our throats. He tells his friends that trading stocks and making money is all a game. But is it? To him? Does he even know what a game is? And what about a little boy being forced to eat broccoli that’s been boiled so long he can strain it through his teeth? Is that a game? Does he know? Do you see?’

  I didn’t. Instead, I thought of Tanya and Zoe all alone back in the apartment and felt the school’s walls press in on me. How stupid we’d been to remain in the city this long. All I could think to do was keep him talking and look for an opportunity to make a run for it.

  ‘I don’t understand. Can you explain?’

  By feigning interest, I ran the risk of sounding patronizing, but I couldn’t think what else to do.

  ‘Glad to, Paul. What’s real? What’s fake? Is what we intend to do ever what we really want to do? And if not, can it matter?’ He laughed. ‘I can see I’m losing you, Paul. I’ll try again.’ He slapped my rolled up manuscript against his thigh. ‘You wrote this book, right?’

  ‘I’m—I was writing it.’

  ‘And this book explicates the things I’m seeing, that we’re all seeing and thinking. Colours are bleeding. Spirits are flashing past. You know all this.’

  I thought of the Blemmye from the other evening and felt my ribs creak in rhythm to my throbbing head, my throbbing fucking universe.

  ‘But how can it do that? It’s just a book, for Christ’s sake.’

  Now that I was asking a real question, Charles got angry. He snarled, keeping his words on a short tether. ‘It’s not just a book! Of course it’s not. They’re not just words. It’s a map. All these words have been hidden away and now they’re coming back to the main stage, Paul. You’re a prophet, Paul.’

  Each time he said my name I found myself grinding my teeth.

  ‘But the question is, ‘how did you know?’ How did you prognosticate it, Paul?’

  Charles loved big words, loved forcing them into his sentences no matter how much they squealed.

  All around us, glass cases on the walls were filled with student drawings and papier-mache sculptures. Every piece of kiddie art looked as insane and distorted as anything I’d seen outside or written about in Nod. Charles caught me staring and smiled even more widely, until I began to fear his face would split from the strain.

  ‘I noticed it too. All those grotesque heads and jagged lines. And just a week ago, just think of it, Paul—all those adults smiling so condescendingly because they thought their kids were too stupid to get reality right. Oops. What do you think?’

  He waited while I thought fast. What did I have to say to get away from him and his greasy mob? One thing was clear: to refuse to play the part he had written for me would probably be to invite more danger than I’d be able to handle. So I started making things up.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I was fascinated by what’s buried beneath, by what was buried beneath the old reality. Sometimes I felt like those words were more real than the world around me. But I don’t know what…’

  I’d run out of words. Faces peered through the glass in the skinny windows beside the doors—trees behind them, shaking their fists at the sky.

  ‘The folks out there want to come in and see you, but I don’t think you’re ready to meet them yet. Let me make this easy for you, Paul. Okay?’

  I bowed my head.

  ‘Just ask me what you can do to help.’

  ‘What can I do to help, Charles?’

  He clapped his hands, and I jumped.

  ‘We’ve got to get organized, Paul. It’s all a
piece of shit. Just think of me as the martini man, sipping away. It’s all shit but not really. Understand? Well, you will. We need a guide, Paul. A leader, a figurehead, a guru, a plaster saint. We gotta get organizized. Did you ever see Taxi Driver? Robert DeNiro? You should. Have. It’s gone for good now. No more movies, ever. Hah! People are staggering around out there, smacking each other on the heads with bricks, Paul. It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing for the species! Who’s insane? That’s insane. People aren’t insane: it’s the things they do that are crazy. Clearly, clearly, clearly. So we need to make some sense here. ‘What we can’t change has to be a church’, Paul. Get it? We have to enshrine you because your book makes sense. It makes sense to me, Paul. Christ, I was up all night reading it when I got it the other day. That’s not as impressive a statement as it once was, I’ll admit that into evidence, but still! There were other things I could have been doing. Lots of other things we need to do. So let’s talk turkey.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Turkey!’ He grinned wildly into my face.

  I laughed with no hope in my heart. Now I was seeing both the name of the game and my role in it. Forget Rice Christian, Charles planned to set me up as a Rice Jesus. He’d been a little cracked before all this, which presumably meant he was two steps ahead in this new reality. When the world stops its rotation and begins to spin backwards, I suppose, stragglers suddenly find themselves ahead of the pack. It must have been quite a feeling.

  ‘Okay. Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk what comes next. Next you need to go out there with me, tell those poor saps that you’ll guide them through these changes, help them to live in Nod.’

  ‘But I…’

  ‘Do you really think you ‘just’ wrote that book, Paul? Is your self-esteem really that low? Do you really think that, prior to seeing that burning bush in the desert, Moses thought he’d see a fucking burning bush in the desert? Or do you think that Moses was a fucking nutbar, Paul? And what about the civilizations that grew out of that encounter between that nutbar and that nutbush? Were they nutbar civilizations? Can you answer that? We won’t even go into Jesus. Christ! These things, they happen. Nobody knows who or why or where or when. Things just happen, Paul. I mean, can’t you see that, Paul?’ He threw his arms out. ‘Isn’t it obvious? So let’s just accept that things are happening. Okay? As a start.’

  Charles’ left foot tapped out a double time beat.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good. Now, here’s what’s going to happen next. We’re going to go out there and do a meet and greet. I’ll do most of the talking. You just look mysterious and…and potent, okay? Impotent if you can swing it! Just kidding! All you need to know is this: being Awake is a gift from God. It’s the next step forward. It’s allowing us to see the bigger universe. And that expanded universe can be a scary place. Be compassionate. But we need to be worthy of this opportunity, right? Worthy. There have been reports of monsters already, Paul. Monsters on the edge of people’s vision. Bat creatures and walking trees. We can name them and that way we can own them like Adam did in Eden. Right? Nod, right? But some other reports, too. Of creatures making contact. Bloody Bones is out there. You remember him, right? And Bloody Hands. All in the streets, Paul, scraping around. And you and I are going to help the people out there deal with these demons, Paul. We’re going to get comfortable with the New World Order.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll know what to say, Charles.’

  But his words blazed right on past mine. I was reminded of firestorms that sucked all the oxygen out of a place. In a forest, after one of these, firefighters would find deer and other animals, still standing, burned to charcoal.

  ‘And then we’ll go to that apartment of yours and get you your girlies and bring them here to the school, which will be our cathedral for the next few days. Then bigger digs. And food. After all, little Zoe needs milk, right? Even shelf milk will do. Right, Paul?’

  My heart stopped.

  ‘Shelf milk. Ha. That’s right. We’ve been watching over you for the last two nights, Paul. If not for my sentries, you’d have been beaten to death in your sleep by some of the more confused people out there. They’re going from door to door, Paul, offering mischief. Doing crazy shit. Bat shit crazy. Chugging little nonsense factories, right? But we’ll straighten them out, don’t sweat it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said feebly.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Paul; I’m not green in the eye. The walls have ears and eyes and even fingers. Glory holes. The walls have cocks now and it’s easy to find yourself fucked when your back’s to the wall. Ha! Now listen.’ He dropped his voice and became sober. ‘I can tell that you’re a Sleeper, which is problematic. I can’t make sense of that yet. But we’ll deal with it at a later date. For now, just get with the program. You’re going to have to do some things. Restrict your sleep! Have some sense of decorum! Get some bags going beneath those eyes! What are you thinking, walking around in this fucking mess so daisy fresh and fragrant, Paul?’

  Charles leaned toward me and sniffed. Then he clapped his hand on my shoulder and pushed me toward the door and those faces pressed against the glass.

  ‘And one more thing. A little thing but a big one. Stop Charles-ing me. Don’t call me Charles anymore. I’m the Admiral of the Blue now. Cheesy, I know. But what the fuck, eh?’

  And then he pushed the doors wide open. The light poured in. The crowd splashed backward, then pooled, then slowly crept toward me.

  DAY 7: Tomorrow Never Comes

  A reproof to those who defer till to-morrow what should be done to-day

  I’d taken Charles’ advice and only slept around two hours the previous night, sat up reading through old magazines by candlelight while Tanya ignored me, staring at some book hour after hour without turning a page.

  Now, in the early morning light, it was almost showtime. While Zoe watched from the sofa, hands clasped beneath her chin, Tanya smeared eye shadow under my cheekbones in an attempt to make me look even more haggard than I already felt. She giggled furiously—like a fury—but when her task was complete, she fell back, mouth slack, eyes dull. I tried to snap her out of it.

  ‘How do I look?’

  She chomped her mouth shut and pinched herself hard, something she’d taken to doing during the last twenty four hours. Her forearms were mottled with black and blue niblets of pain.

  ‘It’s just you. You in makeup.’

  Those were the first words she’d addressed to me in over twelve hours. And even now she was speaking, not to me, not at me, but through me. It was as if we’d been married for fifty years and I was visiting her in the Alzheimer’s ward with not our daughter, but our granddaughter.

  I recall a passage from Being and Nothingness, a portly little tome I’d forced myself to read one summer as an overly earnest undergraduate. About the only thing I remember from its six hundred-odd pages was when Sartre, expanding on Descartes, wrote that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other. From that meeting of the eyes, everything else in our fragile human universes blossomed forth. But! Think of how easily human status is taken away—by war, by hospitals, by arguments about whose turn it is to take out the recycling. How easily we can turn people into things. And now Tanya had turned me into a thing.

  My heart ached at the separation I felt, but I swallowed down the pain as best I could, not wanting to upset any of the three children in the room: oblivious Zoe, the little boy in me who didn’t understand what was happening, or the deranged toddler who crouched, teeth bared, behind Tanya’s face.

  Yesterday, Charles and a couple of his zombies had accompanied me back to the apartment then left, promising to return for us in the morning. But late at night I heard movement in Mrs Simmons’ apartment. Knowing it was Charles’ people didn’t make me feel any better.

  Creepy-crawly. There’s a word of fairly modern derivation. Fr
om 1968, although it sounds like it could have come from centuries earlier, straight from the pages of Brewer. Charles Manson and his Family, prior to the Tate-La Bianca murders, would sneak into wealthy homes high up in the Hollywood Hills. Late at night, while the owners slept, they’d tiptoe around in the dark, moving things. Rearranging furniture. Pocketing a few items. And then they’d leave, before dawn. Practicing.

  The situational irony of my own Admiral of the Blue sharing a Christian name with the head of the Manson Family wasn’t lost on me. Was Manson a product of the twentieth century or a sleeper agent from an earlier one? Or was he a time traveller vomited up from some nightmare future? Or were centuries and eras merely convenient but artificial categories we created to render ‘reality’ manageable through cowering consensus? In that light, a Charles Manson wasn’t an aberration so much as a frightening reminder about what lay beneath things, ready to pop up and yell ‘Boo!’ at any time.

  There’s an old English phrase that means roughly the same thing: Miching Malicho. Even though you’ve almost certainly never heard it before, you can probably sense the phrase’s general meaning from sound alone. Miching: a crimped, furtive verb. Malicho: a virtual portmanteau inversion of “Draco Malfoy” from the Harry Potter books. And that’s what it means: a furtive doer of bad deeds. Our language is so laden with associations that writers can easily cough up names pre-loaded with portent. Darth Vader, Uriah Heep, Gollum.

  I could see the heroic efforts that Tanya’s trembling hand was making. For Zoe’s sake. Tanya had emerged from her state of near-catatonia, pulled her hair into a greasy ponytail, and grown suddenly talkative.