Apocalypse for Beginners (5 page)

“Oh. I see. Problems with your plumbing?”

“Our shower spits huge clots of rust. Usually I just thump the wall to unblock the artery, but this morning, nothing works. Is it okay if I wash up quickly?”

Of course she could. I showed her to the bathroom in the basement. But was that story about soya oil for real? Hope assured me it was. Soya oil had replaced petroleum oil in the 1970s during the
OPEC
embargo. I sometimes wondered what Gutenberg might have thought of our civilization.

Hope shut herself in the bathroom while I tried to finish my math homework. The last problem—an especially nasty equation with three unknowns—was giving me a hard time, but there was absolutely no way I could concentrate. My attention was entirely bent toward the hiss of the shower on the other side of the bathroom door. I tried to focus on the page, but it was no use. I started thinking about X-rays. My mind set to work on the wall, piercing the atoms, penetrating the prefab panels, the wood, the steam, and mapping out Hope’s slender silhouette lathering under the shower.

I was still struggling with my equation when Hope emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, barefoot. She wore a pair of jeans and a Goldorak T-shirt that was a little too small for her—this didn’t help me at all. (She had recently picked up a bagful of children’s clothes at the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store.)

She walked around the basement while she dried the nape of her neck, paused to glance at the TV, and then stopped to scrutinize the large photo of my aunt Ida posing proudly in front of the family fleet of cement trucks. Hope stooped down to read the little bronze plaque:
Bétons Bauermann Inc.—Fiers Bâtisseurs Depuis 1953
.

Hope stepped toward me with her towel wrapped caliph-style around her head.

“Algebra problems?”

I grunted. She grabbed a pencil and, drying her hair with her other hand, cleaned up my calculations. In a few seconds the unknowns gave way to an elegant solution. Then she gestured with her chin at the picture of my aunt Ida.

“Your family is in concrete?”

I smiled. My family was indeed in concrete. Just as Hope was pressing me for more information, my mother arrived at the top of the stairs to ask if we felt like waffles. An altogether rhetorical question. I promised Hope to disclose all the facts on the Bauermann tribe, but some other day. We went upstairs.

The kitchen was filled with a sugary aroma. Laid out on the table were a basket of freshly microwaved waffles, some oranges and a pitcher of corn syrup. My father was reading the business section of the paper, while my mother perused the obituaries. The coffee maker was hard at work and the muted radio provided some ambient noise.

My father, obviously in a good mood, addressed Hope in a booming voice.

“Well, what’s new, Miss Randall?”

Hope beamed a huge smile in his direction and speared three waffles.

“The usual. Major riots in Leipzig in protest against the Communist regime. Oh, and cold fusion has apparently turned out to be a load of bull.”

I studied my parents’ faces while she spread a kilo of Nutella on her waffles. Father: amused. Mother: bewildered. My mother folded the newspaper and swept away a few crumbs with the back of her hand.

“And how is your mother?”

“Okay, I guess. She works a lot. Doesn’t eat well. But if you
really
want my opinion, none of that’s as interesting as cold fusion.”

11. PERFECTLY LIVABLE FOR EXTENDED PERIODS

Hope was spending more and more time in our basement. Given the rather peculiar atmosphere at the Randall Pet Shop, I couldn’t blame her. She needed a change of scenery, so her Russian textbooks gathered dust while we spent all of our evenings ensconced in the huge, squashy sofa, watching TV with a bowl of pretzels close by.

The Nature of Things
having just ended, we slipped into a slight trough, as we always did on Friday nights. For Hope, no act was worthy of following
sensei
Suzuki.

Flipping through the channels, I found a BBC report on the archaeological dig at Pompeii. Hope pretended to pay attention only when the commercials were on—probably just to infuriate me. At every commercial break she would go into raptures, act as if she were in a trance or search for coded messages in the tampon ads (maximum freedom, supreme comfort).

Why is archaeology so underrated?

In Pompeii, the sun was beating down on a group of poorly paid trainees who scraped the ground with trowels and brushes. An Italian archaeologist pointed out one of the site’s particularities: The excavation occasionally uncovered hollows left by the victims’ bodies. By simply pouring plaster into one of these cavities and later prying the cast free with a chisel, they could obtain a 3-D Polaroid of a Pompeii inhabitant at the exact moment of death. (This detail briefly snagged Hope’s attention.)

The camera ranged over a warehouse filled with dozens of such castings. Shelves upon shelves of asphyxiated Roman citizens—recumbent, curled up, snuggling against each other—an entire population turned into concrete.

I wondered if the eruption of Vesuvius had surprised some Pompeians in a final act of copulation and, if so, whether the archaeologists had managed to make convincing casts of these events.

Hope yawned and scratched her navel. She stretched out her arm only to find a few grains of coarse salt at the bottom of the bowl.

“Any pretzels left?”

I handed her the bag. The TV showed walls covered with ancient graffiti. The Romans hadn’t waited for the invention of spray paint to vandalize public spaces. Hope got up and started wandering around the basement while she rummaged in the bag of pretzels. She paused to look at the picture of my aunt Ida and the cement trucks, and then planted herself in front of my sci-fi novels.

“Have you read all of them?”

I nodded. She wiped her hands on her jeans, pulled out an Isaac Asimov title and leafed through it.

“Where do you buy them?”

“At Youri’s. It’s a bookstore on Lafontaine Street.”

She examined the bookshelves from top to bottom until she was kneeling in front of the archaeology section at floor level. Predictably, the contrast made her smile. For Hope, as for most of my peers, it was difficult to recognize the natural connection between science fiction and archaeology.

The report on Pompeii was finishing and Hope immediately insisted on watching the news. I switched channels just in time to catch veteran anchorman Bernard Derome announcing the top stories. Keywords: devastating, typhoon, Thailand.

Gay was the most powerful typhoon to hit the Malaysian peninsula in decades. There were winds approaching 200 kilometres an hour, and we watched a little house get blown out to sea like a cardboard box. It was enough to send shivers up your spine. Would our bungalow have fared any better?

“Interesting question,” Hope murmured.

She looked around the basement and stated that, when you thought about it, the North American bungalow shared certain characteristics with a bunker. It was one of the only modern dwellings where fifty per cent of the living space was located
below
ground level.

“Previously, houses had cellars, crypts, underground rooms, crawl spaces or secret vaults for storing Kalashnikovs. But the basement of a North American bungalow is different. It’s insulated, heated, furnished, equipped with beds, freezers, cold-storage rooms, a television, a telephone and board games.”

“Not to mention the angora rug!”

“Not to mention the angora rug … In other words, it’s perfectly livable for extended periods.”

As she spoke, Hope fished out a stray pretzel from between two sofa cushions.

“The modern basement appeared during the Cold War. It’s the product of a civilization obsessed with its future. But when you think about it, you have to go back to the Stone Age to find so many
Homo sapiens
living underground.”

She tossed the pretzel into the air. It described a perfect parabola before landing between her teeth. Crunch.

“In conclusion, modernity is a fairly relative concept.”

Hope—wow.

She fell asleep during the weather report, head thrown back, muttering incomprehensibly. I turned down the TV, spread a blanket over her legs and watched her sleep for a moment.

The human brain is said to consume one-fifth of the energy produced by the body, but Hope’s brain clearly burned up much more. She was breathing quietly. I shut my eyes and imagined her cortex silently splitting pellets of uranium-235.

12. TERMITES

We caught the last rays of the autumn sun as we sat shivering in the bleachers of the municipal stadium. We were already wearing tuques and coats as protection against the icy wind rising from the river. With such cold weather in early November, the threat of a new ice age could not be shrugged off. I had rifled through my brother’s dresser and dug up an old down parka that was just slightly too big. Bundled up in the bulky red jacket, Hope looked like a little girl, but she didn’t seem to mind.

For weeks she had been demanding a General History of the Bauermann Family—including both fact and lore—so with chattering teeth I was now about to indulge her curiosity.

My forebears left the Netherlands in the middle of the nineteenth century and settled in New Jersey, where they worked as masons, becoming gradually more specialized in cement and concrete. Their success was such that on the eve of the Second World War they ran one of the region’s largest cement companies: the Bauermann Portland Cement Works.

The plant was located beside the Fresh Kills River, a stone’s throw from what would one day become the world’s biggest garbage dump. The biggest factories, the largest dumps—America, the promised land.

The Bauermanns’ golden age came to an end in the early years of the Cold War, when the family was pushed out of the local market by the Mafia. Of course, they tried to stand their ground, but after dozens of battles on the construction sites, death threats, sudden boycotts and a considerable number of truck windshields shattered by baseball bats, my venerable grandfather, Wilhelm Bauermann, decided to leave to other visionaries the task of building New York.

The exodus of the Bauermanns took place on a December morning in 1953. The family convoy stretched over several kilometres of Interstate 87: cement trucks, crushers, washers and, above all, a monumental kiln resting on two drays.

“A
what
?”

“A kiln. It’s a rotating oven. It looks like a large, sloping pipe. Raw material goes in one end, clinker comes out at the other, and the oven can operate day and night, non-stop.”

“Fascinating.”

“May I continue?”

“Please do.”

So, the Bauermanns travelled up into New England, crossed into Canada and stopped at Rivière-du-Loup in an embryonic industrial park a few kilometres from the soon-to-be-built Autoroute 20. Lots of overpasses on the horizon.

Canadian garbage dumps were not as extensive as the American ones, and the factories were smaller. So the Bauermann family scaled down its ambitions. My uncle Kurt would sometimes reminisce about growing up in New Jersey, the giant plant that never slept, the constant traffic of cement trucks, the groan of the kilns and especially the mountains of coal, which, from the top, offered a view of the Manhattan skyline veiled in mist like the Baghdad of
A Thousand and One Nights
.

Our family kept on grinding out cement. The Bauermanns’ destiny was traced out as clearly as the path of a termite colony: my father ran the cement plant, my uncle Kurt managed the concrete plant and my legendary aunt Ida commanded the fleet of cement trucks. She’s the one posing in that famous picture in our basement: arms folded, standing like a rock in front of a half-circle of enormous chrome-plated Mack trucks. Whenever I want to conjure up the image of the conquistador Hernán Cortés, I think of that pose of Aunt Ida’s. Watch out, New World.

Hope laughed. Wasn’t I overstating the case just a little? No, I was not. For the Bauermanns, concrete wasn’t just a business; it was a matter of civilization, a mission to be passed on from father to son. We were builders of worlds.

“So you plan to take over the factory?”

She’d hit on a sensitive subject—the Bauermanns’ calling was in jeopardy. Neither Kurt nor Ida had produced offspring, and my brother had just committed treason by going off to study psychology—my father was still reeling from that blow. As the youngest, the onus of delivering the coup de grâce would fall to me, and I dreaded the day when I would have to announce my intention of studying comparative literature rather than strapping on the harness.

The expression on Hope’s face changed abruptly. She turned toward the bungalows and looked worried, or cross. Just as I was about to ask her what the matter was, hailstones began to pop all around us. Within seconds the storm came crashing down on our heads.

We ran down to the dugout for shelter.

The squall was violent and abrupt. It was impossible to make our voices heard above the din of hail striking the roof of the dugout. The pits in the baseball field soon overflowed with millions of hailstones as immaculate as Styrofoam beads.

Hope looked on, lost in thought. The latter part of my story had evidently annoyed her, and it was not hard to figure out where I had blundered. I had complained about a situation that Hope envied: my father cared about me, had expectations, was interested in my future, even though that future—unfortunately for me—came in the shape of an obsolete cement plant in a remote corner of the country.

As for Mrs. Randall, she nurtured no dreams for her daughter. Hope could become a stripper, a Pentecostal preacher or a cashier at a McDonald’s—it didn’t make the slightest difference.

13. PLEASE AVOID THE VERBS
TO BE
AND
TO HAVE

A Friday like so many others, after school.

The moment I arrived at the Bunker—the nickname that Hope had affectionately given our basement—I switched on the mighty Mac SE and flung my bag down on the floor. It popped open wide enough for a few sheets of paper to spill out, including the instructions for our composition assignment. The topic was rather all-encompassing: “What will the world of tomorrow look like?” Suggested length: 250 words. Please avoid the verbs
to be
and
to have
.