Nod (6 page)

Then the power went out and in the dull glow of the emergency lights, we looked at one another. None of us expected it to go on again.

Those which depend on the state of our eye, and not those which the object really possesses, as when coming into a dark room from the sun. The accidental colour of red is bluish-green, of black, white.

‘Excuse me?’

Framed by lengthening light, the man in the orange hazard vest stared at nothing. I spoke, but he didn’t reply—just stood there as though stillness was mankind’s natural state, as though we were a race of Easter Island figures. He was a Stop Sign Guy: a giant red lollipop tight in his right hand, he was one of a group of city workers attempting to repair a power pole that had been knocked down that morning in the alley behind our apartment. A runaway Brinks truck, since duly sacked and towed, had done the deed.

A shock to see them working.
Why fix a power pole when the power is gone?
I suppose the answer was too obvious, too bedrock, for me to see, even then. To my credit, however, I was beginning to understand that incredulity was now an outmoded response to unfolding events.

Tanya frowned and waved her hand in front of his glazed eyes. ‘Hey? Anybody in there?’

While the rest of his crew stood huddled beside their crane, talking intensely, Stop Sign Guy’s head tilted slightly back as he stared through the blushing sky toward almost-visible stars above and beyond, his mouth agape. In addition to ‘hanging open’, ‘agape’ also means love, as in the way our mouths go slack when we see Beauty. It’s an ancient Greek word, used in more recent times by Martin Luther King Jr. to describe what he termed ‘disinterested love’—Jesus love, Buddha love. Stop Sign Guy had become a slack-jawed statue. Were statues, I wondered, filled with love? Were they enchanted men and women, jaws hanging slack, who’d been flash-frozen by beauty? Had they seen something that had brought their world to a standstill? Were they beings somehow beyond us, beyond our grasping, snapping little world, transfixed by infinity? Agape, just like me—in my dream?

He was a bony little fellow with nicotine fingers. Young but somehow done with youth. I’ve observed that people whose career trajectories arc toward the holding of stop signs eight hours a day are either really thin or really fat. And they all smoke.

We were about to turn and walk away when, suddenly, Stop Sign Guy was back from wherever he’d been. His mouth closed, he swallowed, and we made eye contact.

He smiled. ‘Sorry. What was that?’

Casual, as though nothing strange was going on. The television had said this would happen: momentary space-outs coupled with a band-of-pressure feeling around the skull right around day four or five. Stop Sign Guy smiled helplessly, the kind of fellow who had questionable taste in music and disturbing taste in movies but who would come over on short notice to help you move something heavy. And be truly grateful for the beer he’d receive as payment.

‘Our car’s parked behind your crane. We were just wondering how long you guys are going to be.’

Tanya and I had come up with a plan: we were going to drive out of the city before things got really ugly, most likely really soon. Some tycoon’s empty mansion up at Whistler would suit us well, we thought. Might as well find somewhere nice for the little woman to lose her mind and for me to stretch out my arms and greet the apocalypse. Or maybe it was simpler than a plan: maybe we were just getting incredibly motivated to take flight.

The night before had been loud, even louder than the preceding day. Looking out our windows we’d been able to see that while the rot hadn’t spread noticeably further on the surface of things, it had dug deeper and plunged its roots into the city’s bloodstream. People running around like spiders, darting in and out of shadows beneath the full moon, intentions unfathomable. Picture an old apple whose skin hasn’t yet collapsed—but beneath that skin the flesh is soft as cheesecake. You sense, smell even, that it’s gone rotten, but you don’t know for sure until you touch it and feel it yield beneath the slightest pressure of your thumb.

We heard the occasional gunshot, but easily adapted to that: if anything, given the hard lessons TV news and cop shows had taught us all our lives, it seemed odd that sporadic gunfire
hadn’t
been a normal part of life all along.

Stop Sign Guy was gone again. Hard hat off, he was massaging the back of his head, like his memory was knotted up back there. Bundles of nerves roping up from his body into his brain. Yank them, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, and he’d jerk.

‘Hey! Asshole! What’s your problem?!’

A man in tan overalls, a rage of muscles knotted beneath his superhero-tight T-shirt, had broken off from the group by the crane and was striding toward us. A creature of the gym, he was all swollen limbs and chest. As he neared us, I thought of Blemmyes, headless mythical creatures, their eyes, nose, and mouth lodged in their chests.

‘It’s no biggie, Al.’ Stop Sign Guy was back and speaking up in my defence.

The Blemmye ignored his crew mate and snarled at me through gritted teeth. ‘I said, ‘What’s your
problem?
’ asshole.’

There was a question behind his question, and that shadow question was ‘Do you want to dance?’

The Blemmye moved toward me, and I took a step backward: the opening figure in our mambo.

‘I was just asking when you guys were going to be finished. Our car—’

Then I was on the ground, and he was on top of me, swinging drum-taut fists into my sides. The back of my head felt damp and warm; I’d either landed in a puddle of hot soup or I was bleeding. My arms went up to protect my face, but when I realized my ribs were about to be broken I forced them down, lying at attention while he pummelled my biceps and elbows.

And then I found I didn’t much mind.

I felt the pain, or rather saw pain fireworks exploding before my eyes. Physical pain was suddenly just nerve information, a series of tiny electrical charges whose combined voltage wouldn’t be sufficient to power up a small mouse’s iPod. I was curiously detached.

And so instead of screaming for help or begging for mercy, I simply lay there and watched the Blemmye’s face as it swung at me again and again, now panting with exertion. A shrieking demon. Or a wailing baby. Or a professional wrestler, mid-orgasm, perhaps. And what was that streaming in his eyes? Rage? Fear? Shock? Sadness? All of them? Slowly, my field of vision saturated with strange cellophane colours. I saw the faces of Stop Sign Guy and the other crew members behind the Blemmye’s hulking shoulders as he leaned into his work. Their bared teeth were animal signals for their own swampwatering emotions: the same Trick or Treat Mrs Simmons had been offering the night before.

Time took a hike then, the Blemmye’s blows registering like silent exclamation points, until interrupted by a shrill scream that had to be coming from Tanya—a distant, soaring cry horrified to find itself naked in the open air.

‘You’re killing him!’

The beating didn’t last long after that. Violence stale-dates; you can’t just pound away at a man until all that’s left is a red puddle seeping into the ground; you can’t take someone much past hamburger, really, not even if you’re a serial killer or Gitmo interrogator. Soon enough, hands appeared on the Blemmye’s torso and dragged it off me. Three generic cops who’d appeared out of nowhere.

‘You shouldn’t have pushed him,’ the Blemmye howled, straining against an octopus of arms. The creature’s humanity was, as far as I could see, gone. Did it even have a head? I didn’t think so. I’m still not sure.

‘Pushed him? I never—’

‘Ray, he didn’t push me,’ Stop Sign Guy said, eyes flicking back and forth between the creature and me. ‘Why’re you saying that, dude?’

The Blemmye howled and increased its struggles.

‘If you can walk, you better get out of here, man,’ one of the cops told me. He jerked his chin toward Stop Sign Guy. ‘You too, pal.’

‘Why are you mad at
me
?’ Stop Sign Guy whined, backing down the alley. ‘What did I do? It’s not fair.’

Listening to Stop Sign Guy’s voice, I felt like getting up and pummelling him myself.
Not fair
. Words like ‘fair’ or ‘reason’ seemed aligned with antiquated concepts like ‘vapours’ or ‘humours’ or ‘ether’. Similarly, ‘why’ seemed a completely ludicrous path of enquiry.
Why are you beating me, sirrah?
On Birchin Lane it’s the last question that needs asking; on Birchin Lane it’s a pathetic question, an admission of weakness and defeat. To use the old jailhouse term and not the modern rock and roll one, a
punk’s
question.

As if to prove my thesis, the Blemmye now turned toward Stop Sign Guy and began to gnash and strain in his departing direction, tendons popping.

Tanya helped me to my feet, and I steadied myself against a Smithrite that reeked of puke and putrefaction.

The cops had their guns out now, one pressed to each side of the Blemmye’s head. It was like something out of a Tarantino remake of the Three Stooges: if they both shot, they’d kill each other as well as my attacker.

‘Shut up, motherfucker! Shut the fuck up!’

‘Paul,’ Tanya whispered, ‘Can you walk?’

I nodded.

‘Stand back, give me a shot at him!’ one cop cried.

The other cop crabwalked backward while his partner stood up and pointed his gun down toward the Blemmye’s heart while speaking softly. ‘You stupid motherfucker. You pathetic fucking piece of shit.’

The Blemmye was writhing like a beetle on its back, arms and legs thrashing as it sought to avoid the gun’s glare.

We staggered down the alley and onto Denman Street. No one followed us. Seconds later we heard a shot and a loud whoop but kept moving.

* * *

A lot of broken glass on the sidewalk: trip and you’d cut yourself badly. Yesterday there had been big shards but today the glass had been crunched down into slivers. Tomorrow, perhaps, it would be a crystal powder: Vancouver distilled to its snortable essence.

Our footsteps as we minced along sounded like boots trudging through crusted snow. There were people everywhere, leaning against doorways, sitting on benches and staring, acres of space around them all, all of them looking like leftovers pushed to the back of the fridge.

Two police cars moved slowly down the street as we turned onto Davie, heading east. All the other vehicles, many of them with their windshields smashed and their roofs caved in, were parked or abandoned in the middle of the road.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Those fucking
maniacs
.’ She screamed the last word over her shoulder then turned back to me. ‘Listen, we’ve got to get you to St. Paul’s. That’s at least fifteen blocks away. Do you think you can walk that far? I don’t think we’ll be able to—there aren’t any cabs.’

Her voice was pulling me back from wherever I’d been.

‘I’ll try.’

* * *

Dusk, the Blindman’s Holiday. Too dark to work by daylight and too soon to light candles. A rheumy-eyed mutt stood in the middle of the sidewalk watching us. He didn’t move, so we stepped around him. Dogs behave differently at night than they do during the day. Not just now: it’s always been that way. At night the ones that have a bone to pick with humankind come growling a little nearer than they would in full sunlight while the frightened, shrinking ones slink a little deeper into the shadows. Now the same thing was happening to the people.

With the deepening of evening, some of the shadowy figures we encountered looked away when I glanced in their direction while others stared back hard, their pupils black and sharp. A week ago I would have thought they were playing tough, but now I saw that it was more than that. They were trying to make us into objects, to force our eyes down and strip away our humanity. Look down and lose or stare back and be prepared for a fight? The old urban conundrum had taken on a sinister new urgency; choices that, until a few days ago, had only to be made in crack alleys or biker bars were now popping up, like toadstools, all around us.

Tanya stopped. Unprepared, I stumbled against her. She turned and searched my eyes.

‘What’s with you, Paul?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean is you’re not showing any emotion. That fucking gym ape back there was going to kill you. You know?’

‘I know.’

‘And you’re not that brave. You should be shaking in your boots.’

She was pushing at buttons, hoping to trigger some outrage, but I didn’t have any to offer her.

‘I know that too.’

‘Well?’

‘The beating didn’t hurt. And it didn’t scare me. I don’t know why.’

She rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers, then spoke through gritted teeth. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to be taking care of me! What am I doing babysitting you?’

She was right, of course. And
that
hurt, even if the beating hadn’t. There were black rings under Tanya’s eyes, and her makeup was poorly applied, resulting in a kind of fuzziness around her face that made it hard for me to look at her. It was time to man up and play the strong, silent part. There was no way I could tell her about the Blemmye now. Thinking of the absurdity of the situation I laughed, as much from a dearth of options as from any other cause.