Nod (4 page)

Strangeness glazed all the normal sights; everything looked the same as before, but no one could have taken in the scene and not known something was very different. This morning we were a city of glassy eyes.

‘Those guys,’ Tanya whispered, pointing to a gay couple and their matching black labs, ‘They aren’t walking their dogs. Their dogs are walking them.’

And I saw it, literally saw her metaphor made real. The dogs looked calm and confident while the humans attached to the other end of their leashes were mere dragged baggage.

What else? I looked around.

All eyes were directed inward; everyone had their introspecs on. As we passed silent bakeries and cafes we could see money changing hands; we could hear the clink of coins being counted then splatting onto marble counters. People hunched across tables, reading one another’s lips.

‘As if what they’re whispering about isn’t exactly what everyone else is whispering about,’ Tanya said loudly, causing a few heads to turn, first toward us—then quickly away.

Reaching the restaurant, we sat down at a table by the open front window and ordered from the waitress. She was a tank-faced woman of Slavic descent who looked like she’d spent her youth being fed steroids in some old Soviet bloc waitress training facility. Then we settled into silence, scrutinizing our cutlery. Some mornings there’d be dried egg yolk on the tines of one of our forks, and we’d call the waitress over. She’d replace the utensil without apology, indeed, with something verging on contempt for our bourgeois, our
kulak
squeamishness.

I turned my knife in the sun, and as it flashed I remembered my dream. Two nights in a row. I was just going to tell Tanya about it when I saw, heading straight toward us, Charles.

How to introduce Charles into this narrative?

While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm’s length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it’s the fact that we misanthropes don’t discriminate—the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow.

Charles smelled bad. What more do I really need to say? He was an outsider always looking for a way in. But no one would let him in. Instead, we relegated him to the status of dumpster diving ‘local character’. As though he were fictional.

I can say of myself that I have no time for people until I understand them, and then I whiplash all the way from contempt to pity. A shitty way to live: the worst of everything. Contempt is bad, but pity’s worse. Pity’s sticky: it clings to the poor fool who presumes to be in a safe enough place from whence to do the commiserating.

‘Oh shit.’ Tanya had seen him.

‘Hey, Paul.’ Charles spoke to me but looked down at the empty chair beside her.

‘Hi Charles.’

I’d never learned his last name; we’d never been introduced. I only knew his
first
name because people spoke about him behind his back when he left the table. Always Charles. Never Chuck, never Charlie. The formality a shuffling away.

‘How’s the new book coming, Paul?’

Involuntarily, I glanced down at my manuscript on the chair beside me and prayed he wouldn’t notice it. Charles knew I wrote. Had checked my books out from the Joe Fortes library where he and dozens of other floaters spent their days. Checked them out and, oddly enough, read them.

‘Slow.’ He probably thought the whole world spoke in Tarzan-like monosyllables. But you couldn’t shut him down with curt replies—brevity just opened up more space for
his
words.

‘Okay if I sit?’ he asked, preemptively folding himself into an empty chair.

Charles had the red plastic face of someone who lived rough. His expression was friendly, but fixed that way, as though with bobby pins or staples. He was fairly tall but came across short, with all the awkwardness and crumpledness that entails—like a hinged skeleton you pull out of a cardboard box each Halloween and half-heartedly thumbtack to your front door.

‘How’s Miss Soviet Union 1962 this morning?’

As he said this, Charles glanced around to make sure the waitress wasn’t near. He was invoking a triangle of intimacy:
we
three were talking about
her
. She was the outsider, not him.

‘She’s okay.’

‘You’re too nice. I bet she’s not going to sell much coffee this morning.’

‘It’s not funny, Charles,’ Tanya said, as though to a floor-peeing puppy.

‘Starbucks is going to be empty today. And I quote, “
The New York Times
reports that the American Starbucks chain has been forced to shut down a thousand outlets in the last year.” And that was before. People are no longer buying into—. It’s definitely a broadcast from the new Russian-Chinese satellite string, Paul. It’s like something out of an Ian Fleming novel.’ He pronounced it ‘Fleeming’. ‘They’re disrupting our brainwaves with some sort of static. We’ll start to panic and the markets will fall apart, just like after 911, then after a couple of days they’ll march in and buy us all up. It’s so obvious.’

‘Yeah, but the Chinese aren’t sleeping either. So where does that leave you?’

The waitress slapped our plates down on the table.

‘No. No satellite. God.’

We all stared as sunlight made brutal cement of her skin.

‘And
why
would God do this to us?’ Charles said finally, supercilious for my benefit.

‘Because of faggots and terrorists and the shit television, stupid street bum. God is telling us no rest for the wicked. Now He will see who listens to Him.’

She folded tuberous arms across her chest. There was no room for the conditional or hypothetical in the woman’s English; she was all declaratives and imperatives.

It was too much for Tanya, who had no time for Bible babblers, having been raised by a couple and having moved across a continent to escape their take on bliss.

‘You keep your hateful opinions to yourself, or I’ll talk to the owner.’

There was spittle on Tanya’s lower lip, and she wiped it away without self-consciousness.

The waitress smirked.

‘Fuck you,’ she said, then turned and left us.

‘Fuck you too,
bitch
!’ Tanya screamed after her, a single vein throbbing blue in the centre of her forehead.

‘Can you believe that?’ Charles asked me eagerly. ‘What do you think about all this, Paul? You look pretty well-rested. Did you sl—?’

‘And fuck you too,
Charles
.’ Tanya whirled back around.

‘I don’t—’

‘Nobody asked you to join us. Nobody ever asks you to join them. Ever shut up long enough to wonder why?’

Charles jumped up, hiding his hands behind his back, like he’d been bad.

‘I didn’t mean to intrude,’ he said, his face growing redder.

Tanya laughed, possessed by the cruel ghost of two nights’ lost sleep.

‘Intrude.
Please
. Disturbing people is all you ever do. Don’t insult us by pretending you don’t know that.’

‘Tanya…’ I began.

‘
Tanya
,’ she mimicked. ‘Am I wrong?
Is
he welcome? Did you want him to come over? Shall we order him the Special?’

Charles backed across the room, his eyes fixed on mine, bumping into chair after chair until he disappeared out a back door that led into the alley. We sat silently, Tanya staring at her congealing food and me at mine. The egg yolks were lemon meringue where they should have been tangerine. A vision of caged, armless mothers flashed through my mind, but I shook it off.

‘Did you have to do that?’

‘He was going to ask you if you were a Sleeper.’

And that was the first time I heard the word used in its new sense—capitalized. Had Tanya picked it up off the television or had she coined it herself? Or were a few billion frazzled brains simultaneously beginning to name this new reality?

‘So?’

‘I just didn’t think it was a good idea to tell him.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know why not, Paul. No reason I guess. But fuck him anyway. I don’t have time for it. Let’s just eat.’

We did our best with the food we’d been given but only managed crusts and coffee. After a while, one of us, I can’t remember who, said, ‘This is only the beginning, isn’t it?’

We both looked around then and the restaurant was empty, no waitress, no Charles, no other customers. Just like no one had set foot in the place for a thousand years.

This was a Roman practice under the notion that it kept off the plague.

At 8am the next morning something called the International Microwave Communication Ban went into effect. Someone in an office somewhere took a deep breath, exhaled and flipped a switch. Instantly, ISPs and cell service providers around the world went down. More switches were flipped and the landlines went silent too. The night before, posters had gone up all over the city announcing that Xbox controllers and garage door openers were now verboten. The idea was to bring down the walls of static that permeated our lives and see if we could unclench our brains and snooze in the resulting stillness.

Then, at 8:01, it hit me. Tanya and I were on our own. The network of threads binding us to family and friends had been torn down. Suddenly distance became real, probably for the first time in our lives. Toronto was infinitely distant and even the condos of friends across English Bay seemed impossibly far away.

Was it time to mourn yet? Almost, almost.

Although the ban was UN-sanctioned and backed by the threat of military force, there were rumours that Russia and China weren’t playing fair, that they were keeping an electronic exoskeleton of services online in order to avoid what would have to be devastating impacts on their economic, military, and political infrastructures. No doubt they were—and no doubt we were too.

At 9am uniforms appeared. The police, the army, the fire brigade, and for all I knew, the SPCA—the powers-that-be deployed anyone who could lay their hands on some sort of official-looking outfit into the streets. Vans with antennae cruised past slow and coy, followed by jeeps loaded down with gum-chewing reservists. Why did good-hearted Canadian boys, brought up with the sweet succor of liberal marijuana laws and universal health care, suddenly look so badass and American the moment you slapped a uniform on their backs and handed them a pack of Juicy Fruit?

I was out there in the thick of it, trying to get to the Safeway to stock up on provisions. There was a lineup of around five hundred people outside of the store. People were being admitted in groups of ten by a group of soldiers at the door. ‘Cash only’ read a handwritten sign, inevitable now that credit and debit cards were defunct. And how long until the centuries-long spell was broken, money turned back into paper, and we reverted to bartering eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth?

‘Any idea how long it takes to get in?’ I asked the woman ahead of me.

She didn’t reply but simply shook her head stiffly and shuffled forward.

* * *

The answer was it took three hours.

When I finally reached the door, my entry was blocked by a pock-marked soldier with a twitch in his eyes that made me think he was winking ironically each time he spoke.

‘Arms up.’

‘Sure.’

He patted me down, pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket, and tossed it into a pile of electronic devices behind him. A half million dollars’ worth of high tech goodies reduced to the status of broken old Transformers toys.

‘Why are you taking them? They don’t work anyway.’

‘Got cash?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘Fifty or sixty bucks.’

He snorted. ‘That should get you a pack of bologna. Happy shopping.’

He stood aside, and I went in.

I soon saw what he meant. All the nicely-printed shelf tags had been pulled off and prices written directly on the goods in red felt pen. They were now roughly triple what they’d been two days ago. At least capitalism was still alive and functioning properly. The thought of that invisible hand still busily bitch-slapping the poor and desperate was almost reassuring. After all, in order to muster up the will to profiteer, one needs to be able to envision a future in which to spend one’s ill-gotten gains.

The shelves were rapidly emptying. I checked my wallet and thought fast. My three twenty dollar bills weren’t going to go far, so I had to think protein. More than that, I had to think
unpopular
protein. In the peanut butter section, a T-shirt-shredding fist fight had broken out between two burly men. A shattered glass jar lay on the floor between them as they wrestled above the slimy, jagged mess.

In the ethnic aisle I got lucky and caught sight of a half dozen jars of tahini at the back of a top shelf. Survival of the tallest. I grabbed four—all I could afford. Then, clutching the jars to my chest, I pushed my way toward the checkout stand.

* * *

Coming out of the store I saw that the line had now swelled to a couple of thousand panicky people who were surging forward against the line of soldiers. Something ugly was going to happen soon. An idea had to be growing in that massive line up:
why pay when every defenseless person leaving the store with an armful of groceries is a sort of walking Food Bank?