Apocalypse for Beginners Read online

  Copyright © 2010 Éditions Alto

  English Translation Copyright © 2010 Lazer Lederhendler

  Published by arrangement with Éditions Alto,

  Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2010. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

  Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Dickner, Nicolas, 1972–

  Apocalypse for beginners / Nicolas Dickner; translated by Lazer

  Lederhendler.

  Originally published under title: Tarmac.

  Issued also in electronic format.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-39943-4

  I. Lederhendler, Lazer, 1950– II. Title.

  PS8557.I325T2713 2010 C843’.6 C2010-902047-2

  v3.1

  For Z and G

  N.D.

  —

  For David, my son

  L.L.

  “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

  YOGI BERRA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Vaporized

  2. The Pet Shop

  3. The Randalls

  4. Purely Accidental

  5. A Disturbing Logic

  6. Teach Yourself Russian at Home

  7. Struck Down by Fate

  8. Einstein’s Twenty-Five Suits

  9. The Last Great Mania

  10. Cold Fusion

  11. Perfectly Livable for Extended Periods

  12. Termites

  13. Please Avoid the Verbs To Be and To Have

  14. Grenzmauer

  15. Kaboom!

  16. The Dawn of a New Era

  17. Megalemons

  18. An Ordinary Component of Everyday Reality

  19. Einstein was Wrong

  20. Tora! Tora! Tora!

  21. A Little Prayer

  22. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Psychiatry

  23. A Fairly Optimistic View of the Universe

  24. Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum

  25. Mayhem at the Saint Vincent De Paul

  26. Chimps in the Closet

  27. Hunter-Gatherer

  28. Disturbing News

  29. Amenorrhea Mysteriosa

  30. Randall Thinking

  31. One Day at a Time

  32. Texture

  33. In Friendly Territory

  34. Anything that Burns

  35. I am Shiva

  36. In the Baths of Rome

  37. The Most Natural Event on Earth

  38. Spices and Colouring

  39. Marcus was Here

  40. Television is the Enemy

  41. The Ophir III

  42. Banished from Eden

  43. Details on Page 47

  44. Satellite TV

  45. The Beginning of the World

  46. Plutonium

  47. A Tiny Oasis of Warmth

  48. Crumbs and Foam Rubber

  49. The End is Nigh

  50. More Reliable than a Package of Ramen

  51. The Most Unpleasant Publisher in the Known Universe

  52. A Rapidly Expanding Niche

  53. Mission

  54. Greyhound

  55. Menu for Travellers

  56. There Were No Good Old Days

  57. Labyrinth

  58. Poor Chuck Starts to have Problems

  59. Supercharged

  60. You are Leaving the American Sector

  61. May I Borrow Your Gas Mask?

  62. The Great Primal Soup

  63. Cul-De-Sac

  64. 1945

  65. An Impossible Angle

  66. An Increasing Tolerance for the Unlikely

  67. Raid

  68. Mutation

  69. Modern Art

  70. The Gyre

  71. Carpet Bombing

  72. In Space and Time

  73. Better Equipped Than in 546

  74. Killing Time

  75. Scientific Discovery of the Day

  76. The Nineteenth Stop

  77. Madame Sicotte

  78. Thirty-Seven Minutes

  79. Crosswords Weekly

  80. Distorting the Collective Psyche

  81. A Unique Ability

  82. The Speed of the World

  83. Under a Different Light

  84. A Three-Thousand-Year Voyage

  85. Weapon of Mass Destruction

  86. Does Anyone Still Talk about Nuclear Winter?

  87. Incandescent Waves

  88. A Serious Dent in Reality

  89. The Burden of Perpetuation

  90. Kiln

  91. Only about Thirty Hours of Anxiety Left

  92. Madame Hikari

  93. An Ordinary Day

  94. Take Heart!

  95. Ethnological Observation No. 743

  96. Today’s Active Young Japanese Woman

  97. What Came Next

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1. VAPORIZED

  August 1989. Ronald Reagan had vacated the White House, the Cold War was winding down and the outdoor municipal swimming pool was, once again, closed for maintenance.

  Rivière-du-Loup was immersed in a chicken broth of pollen-saturated, yellowish air, and I wandered glumly around the neighbourhood, my towel around my neck. Just three days remained before the start of the new school year, and nothing but a few good laps through chlorinated water could have boosted my morale.

  I ended up at the municipal stadium. Not a soul in sight. The lines on the baseball field were freshly drawn and the scent of chalk still wafted around. I’d never cared about baseball but, for no particular reason, I loved stadiums. I walked past the dugout. On an old sun-bleached newspaper a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square could just barely be made out.

  That was when I noticed the girl sitting up in the very last row. Her nose was buried in a book, as though she was killing time waiting for the next game to begin.

  Without giving it too much thought, I climbed up the bleachers in her direction.

  I’d never seen her in the neighbourhood. She was thin, with bony hands and a face studded with freckles. The visor of her Mets cap was pulled down low over her eyes and the left knee of her jeans was ripped. The jeans were not of the trendy acid-washed variety, but rough-cut work pants, an ancient pair of Levi’s salvaged from some coal mine in the New Mexico desert.

  Her back pressed against the guardrail, she was reading a language-learning manual: Teach Yourself Russian at Home, Volume 13.

  I sat down without speaking. She made no sign of noticing me.

  The wooden benches scorched our behinds. The sun poured down so mercilessly I was tempted to turn my towel into a turban, but I was afraid of appearing ridiculous. High overhead I could see a 747 tracing long parallel lines of cirrus clouds in the sky. Dry weather ahead.

  I was on the verge of spouting some meteorological small talk when the girl tilted up the visor of her cap.

  “Last night I dreamt about the bomb at Hiroshima.”

  A few seconds went by while I pondered this unconventional preamble.

  “Why specifically the Hiroshima bomb?”

  She fol
ded her arms.

  “The destructive power of modern bombs is unimaginable. Take, for example, an ordinary ballistic missile, about five hundred kilotons. The explosion is enough to send a chunk of tectonic plate into orbit. It’s beyond what the human brain can grasp.”

  Where was this girl from? I couldn’t pin down her accent. English? Acadian? My guess was Brayon—from Edmundston, New Brunswick, to be exact. She yanked an empty Cracker Jack box out from between two planks and proceeded to turn it into confetti.

  “Little Boy had a yield of approximately fifteen kilotons. Not exactly a firecracker, but easier to measure all the same. If it exploded over our heads, at six hundred metres—the same altitude as the Hiroshima explosion—the shock wave would flatten the city over a radius of 1.5 kilometres. That amounts to an area of seven square kilometres. Which represents …”

  She squinted, concentrating on the massive mental calculation.

  “Two thousand five hundred baseball fields.”

  She stopped shredding the Cracker Jack box long enough for her arms to sweep instructively over the landscape.

  “The shopping mall would be pulverized, bungalows would be blown to pieces, cars would be sent flying like cardboard boxes, the lampposts would flop down on the ground. And that’s just the shock wave. Then there would be the thermal radiation. Everything would be reduced to ash over dozens of square kilometres—way, way more baseball fields! Near the bomb, the heat would be greater than the temperature at the surface of the sun. Metal would liquefy. Sand would turn into little glass beads.”

  Having finished the shredding job, she weighed the pile of confetti in the palm of her hand.

  “And do you know what would happen to us, two tiny, little primates made up of 60 per cent water?”

  She gently turned her hand upside down and let the breeze carry the confetti off toward left field.

  “We would be vaporized in three thousandths of a second.”

  She finally turned my way and took a good look at me, probably to gauge how well I’d held up to her lesson. Pretty well, by and large. Her gaze told me I had passed the test.

  Her face softened, and I detected the hint of a friendly smile. Then, without saying another word, she plunged back into her Russian handbook.

  The shock wave having left me slightly worse for wear, I dropped back against the guardrail. I observed the girl sideways as I wiped my forehead with a corner of the towel. I could have sworn she generated a magnetic field—the radiation of her 195 IQ.

  Not only had I never seen this girl before, but I had never seen any girl like her. And just as I was thinking this, it dawned on me that if I ever had to be vaporized in the company of someone else, I would definitely want it to be her.

  2. THE PET SHOP

  Her name was Hope Randall and she had just rolled in from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

  “Do you know where that is?”

  She outlined a map of Nova Scotia in the air with her index finger, and stabbed a pinhole at the southern tip of the peninsula, opposite Maine. A distance of 1200 kilometres from Rivière-du-Loup.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Hope and her mother had arrived in town three days earlier and moved into a house on Amyot Street that was wedged between the Clean-O-Matic launderette and the kitchen of the Chinese Garden Restaurant. Two high temples of local cleanliness.

  She turned the key a few times in the lock and gave the door a kick.

  “Welcome to the Randall Pet Shop!”

  Suddenly it came back to me. A pet shop had been located there—L’Arche de Nowé (sic)—but it had closed down the previous winter and been converted into a (moderately) acceptable apartment. The position of the counter, the shelves and the aquariums could still be deduced from outlines on the floor. An all-pervading aroma of Asian stir-fries hung in the air but it could not disguise the lingering odours of parrot droppings, chinchilla piss and dry cat food.

  The furniture (included in the rent) consisted of a rickety table, four chairs, a set of dented appliances and a couch that, with no TV in sight, was the epitome of pointlessness.

  Hope assured me that they been there for less than seventy-two hours, yet every corner of the place was piled high with an inordinate supply of food: sacks of flour, bags of ramen, containers full of water or cooking oil, canned food of every description. In fact, the only non-edible item was a small stack of Teach Yourself Russian at Home (volumes 8, 14 and 17), to which Hope now delicately added the volume she had been reading at the municipal stadium.

  “Thirsty?”

  I nodded. While she poured me a glass of water I scanned the pet shop looking for adjoining rooms. There were none, except for an oddly spacious bathroom—no doubt the former Lizards’ Lair. But where did they sleep? Hope second-guessed me and pointed to the couch.

  “It folds out. I sleep in the bathtub, with the door shut. It’s impossible to get any sleep within ten feet of my mother.”

  “She snores?”

  “No. She talks in her sleep.”

  “Really?”

  I took a sip of water. It tasted suspiciously metallic.

  “So, what does she say?”

  Hope seemed annoyed by the question and began to chew at her thumbnail.

  “No idea. Stuff in Assyrian.”

  “Assyrian?”

  “Assyrian or Aramaic—who knows? I have no clue about dead languages.”

  She chewed off a sliver of fingernail and spat it out.

  “People in my family are polyglots.”

  “I can see that,” I said, pointing my foot at the Russian handbooks.

  “I also started to learn German, but I had to abandon my books in Yarmouth. They wouldn’t fit in the car.”

  “Abandon?”

  “Yes. We left in the middle of the night because …”

  She sighed.

  “Okay. I might as well start at the beginning.”

  3. THE RANDALLS

  Mary Hope Juliet Randall, called Hope, was the youngest member of a family that, for an indeterminate number of generations—some put the number at seven—had been afflicted by a serious obsession with the end of the world.

  The Randins, a family with vaguely Acadian roots, had been deported by the British in 1755. They landed in Maryland, adopted the name Randall—though without giving in to assimilation—and eventually returned to Nova Scotia, where they spent the ensuing decades squatting barren patches of peat bog.

  In fact, the family obsession with the apocalypse might reasonably be traced back to that geopolitical trauma. Indeed, wouldn’t it be expected, or even inevitable, for a line of exiled farmers to be somewhat sensitive about urban sprawl, major disasters and the natural course of history? Yet there was no consensus around this theory, and certain genealogists favoured the hypothesis of a congenital condition due to inbreeding (the Randalls were confirmed homebodies).

  One thing, however, was certain: the same symptoms recurred with choreographic precision from one generation to the next. So, at puberty, every Randall was super-naturally made privy to the details of the end of the world—the date, the time, the exact form it would take.

  As a rule, the vision came at night. Actually, it wasn’t exactly a vision, which could have been dismissed as a mere nightmare. No. The Randalls tuned in to the apocalypse on a visceral level. They felt the patter of rain and the burn of shrapnel on their skin, they suffocated in the fires, tasted the ash, heard the screams, smelled the stink of rotting corpses.