Nod (26 page)

A ceremony which takes place after sunset, when performers, to show their indignation against some man or woman who has outraged propriety, assemble before the house and make an appalling din with bells, horns, tin plates, and other noisy instruments.

I’m writing purely to keep myself awake now. I began this journal three or so days ago and have been scribbling constantly when not hunting for water and food for Zoe. And finally I find myself here in the present tense. The action tank is dry, and what follows will be strictly denouement—I hope.

It’s not quite safe to let Zoe go yet, though the pull to sleep is almost overwhelming. A couple of times each day I almost lose it, almost become a complete stranger to myself and drift away once and for all. Then I think of Zoe and slowly ease myself back down into myself, a ghost wiggling back into its former body through a hole in the top of the head, gripping the ears for traction. But it’s getting harder.

Ever since the Rabbit Hunt went south, there’s been a lot of activity around the base of my apartment. Charles and his remaining followers keep trying to burn the building down. It’s kind of funny, actually. In all fairness, though, it’s hard to burn down a concrete building—even when one is in full possession of one’s wits.

Each day at nightfall, Charles crawls up onto a pathetic stage they’ve built and makes some sort of rambling, increasingly incoherent speech about the Ragnarok taking him home, about my evil nature, and about the beast I am supposed to be harbouring up here in my tower of darkness. Then he collapses and twitches like a trout in the belly of a boat. An hour or four pass and then he staggers to his swollen, curled feet and froths some more. After that he and the two or three who still follow him around go and set some half-assed fire in the lobby. I hear giggling, then growling, then sobbing.

Last night, though, their efforts almost came to something. I heard crackling and smelled smoke, but concrete construction foiled them yet again. Still, for a while, it must have been exciting. When they’re not setting fires, they try to untangle the jammed stairwells or worm their way up into the ceilings. But so far, so good.

Earlier this evening, while Zoe played with her bear, I snuck down to the fourth floor. Leaning out of a window directly above the stage, I called Charles’ name. He looked up and smiled faintly, clawing with blind hands in my general direction. Poor Charles. Never sleeping means that he is ceaselessly himself—and the honest-to-Bosch truth is that that has to be a good working definition of Hell. Not just to be Charles all the time, but to be any of us.

‘Paul? Is that you? Come out to play, Paul!’

‘How are you doing, Charles?’

‘I’m a king, Paul! Nod is mine!’

‘Well, you’re welcome to it.’

‘I saw you, you know. Before! I saw you step over some smelly drunk on the sidewalk one day. Was he sleeping? Was he dead? You didn’t care! You didn’t see him, Paul! To see anything you’d have had to stay awake for days, right? But I saw things all the time. There’d be a pretty couple in the park, breaking up. Then the next day I see lover boy and there are bags under his eyes. So I pay attention and watch him making his rounds for the next few days—to work, to Starbucks, to Safeway, and home. Maybe to the bank. I watch the bags under his eyes get deeper. Then I know he’s seeing something. Maybe he even looks at
me
for a second when he walks past. He starts to see me! But then something scares him, and he scurries away. Then what? A week later I see him reading a newspaper, and he’s been put back together. Magic! He did it with drinks or dope or some fresh pussy, or I don’t know what. Then he doesn’t see me anymore. He doesn’t see anything.’

‘I don’t know what to say, Charles. I’m sorry if your life was hard. But it was hard for a lot of people.’

‘Why don’t you come down here, Paul? Come visit old Charles.’

‘You know I can’t do that. I’ve got to take care of the child.’

Suddenly, he is in a frenzy, writhing on his stage, trying but unable to stand.

‘Protecting the child? Why? Innocence is just torture delayed. And torture delayed is just worse torture!’

And then he was on his knees, weeping. After a few minutes, slowly, agonizingly, he crawled to the edge of his stage, fell to the ground with a thud, and slithered out of sight. No more danger. No more plans. No more followers. No more Nod. That was the last time I ever saw him.

A Christmas game. One blindfolded knelt down, and being struck had to guess who gave the blow.

Every day is important; each day makes us. Even the nothing ones—
especially
those, given how they silt up, slowly burying other, seemingly more momentous, moments beneath their weight. I see that now.

What we used to blithely call ‘wasting time’ was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn’t an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It may not end up being a compelling defence to have to make before a ticked-off Jesus come Judgement Day (quite possibly today, now that I think about it), but still it’s true—who knew?

In these final hours, I meditate on the passing of Nod and—of course—on words. There’s more power in words than people think. How does the Bible begin?
In the beginning was the Word.
Nod was the miracle of the undergraduate poet, the sensitive young person who discovers that he or she can combine adjectives and nouns higgledy piggledy and come up with all sorts of fantastic monsters: cowering towers, fierce slumber, panicky taxis, shy murderers, and the like.

During my time in Nod, I came to believe that if something can be imagined it must be possible. Want proof? We imagined space flight, then it happened for real. We imagined holograms and they happened too. We imagined teleportation and just a couple of summers ago I read how some Australian scientists teleported a beam of light an inch or two. So is a Rice Christian or a Blemmye or a burning ice cube or a green sun or a widowed scarecrow just some meaningless assemblage of sounds and letters? Or, in some way, are they all real? Wow, I’m really babbling here in Babylon, holed up in my tower of words.

* * *

What would it be like to be an animal in that cold frontier beyond words? A grizzly pacing out infinite forest? A blind crustacean at the bottom of a frigid black sea? To see
without
words, to emerge from words’ insect haze and breathe only air?

I can’t tell you what it’s like. Instead, you get all this. Words, words, words. Meaning swishing slowly back and forth like the tail of a hackling dog, menacing centuries. Nod.

* * *

I lower Zoe from the fourth floor. In a basket, on a rope. She lands gently on the sidewalk, untangles herself, then runs off toward the park without looking back, grizzly dangling. Goodbye again, Tanya.

So this is my final entry. Time to say goodbye to it all, to the world and all of the words I’ve loved so much. Goodbye to it all.

I go to my bed and lie down flat on my back.

Goodbye to chocolate and puppies and hard ons and old running shoes and used books and Christmas morning and crisp newspapers and babies and Coca Cola and sunburned skin on white cotton sheets and bad moods and late night eating and high speed Internet and Charlie Brown and ice cream and Beatle music and Beach Boy harmonies and fruit smoothies and thrift stores and black and white photos and favourite books and cold beer and snow storms and heavy rain and meals in restaurants and arriving and departing and exhaustion and the need to piss and tiredness and bicycles and cars and kisses on the neck and stretching and arguments and water and salt and paintings and shade and Dickensian waifs and waxy pine needles and hot sand and the smell of cedar and every line Shakespeare ever wrote and shaving and sore muscles and crunching ice cubes and mail boxes and popcorn in movie theatres and pay cheques and the smell of limes and

Thanks to Bluemoose Books (Kevin and Hetha Duffy, Lin Webb and particularly my editor, Leonora Rustamova, whose insight and good humour were invaluable). Thanks also to various early readers who encouraged me, including Almeda Glenn Miller, Teralee Trommeshauser, F. Paul Markin, Donna Tremblay, Stephen May, and Robin Yassin-Kassab. Finally, thanks to my wife, Charlene, for numerous read-throughs and many valuable suggestions, and to our sons Ethan and Liam for hashing stuff out on long drives down south—your cheques are in the mail.

Adrian Barnes
was born in Blackpool, England and moved to Vancouver, Canada in 1969. He and his former wife, Charlene, raised their two sons, Ethan and Liam in Rossland, BC. He received a MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and
Nod
is his first published novel.

To celebrate the publication of
Nod
, Adrian Barnes was interviewed by Stephen May, author of
Life! Death! Prizes!
and
Wake Up Happy Every Day
(Bloomsbury), for his website
thesecondbesttime.blogspot.co.uk
.